Clay Shirky - new day, same old dishonest New Media blather

Well, Clay Shirky, this time with two co-authors, has largely “done it again.”

He’s commented mordantly on the financial future of journalism without major overhauls, while again largely dissing paywalls as part of the financial side of that overhaul.

As part of that, he (like Jay Rosen and others) has again — deliberately, I have to think — misunderstood Stewart Brand’s “information wants to be free” idea.

He’s again overtouted crowdsourcing’s potential value.

And, he’s exacerbated that by now touting the bright, shiny future of machine-generated journalism, while writing nary a word about ethical and other problems that have already cropped up with machine-generated journalism.

This is all in a new report, portentiously, or perhaps pretentiously, titled, “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present.”

Here’s some insights from the PDF of the report.

Page 12 of text:

Web advertising has never generated anything like the same revenue per reader, mobile looks even worse, and the continuing rise in online advertising generally is now often bypassing traditional news properties altogether. Meanwhile, hoped-for sources of direct fees—pay walls, micropayments, mobile apps, digital subscriptions—have either failed or underperformed.

Of these, digital subscriptions, as practiced at the Los Angeles Times, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, New York Times and others have done best, but even here the net effect of subscriptions has not made up the print shortfall. Furthermore, because most digital subscriptions are designed to increase print circulation, the short-term effect of digital subscriptions has the immediate effect of making the papers more reliant on print revenue, despite the long-term deterioration of print.

We do not believe the continued erosion of traditional ad revenue will be made up on other platforms over the next three to five years. For the vast majority of news organizations, the next phase of their existence will resemble the last one—cost reduction as a forced move, albeit in a less urgent (and, we hope, more strategic) way, one that takes into account new news techniques and organizational models.

Generally agreed on the “outlook” side, including for mobile. But, if that is what it is, for short, and even medium, term, it makes sense that paywalls should in part be used to drive people (Back) to print. Also, Shirky fails to mention his past general opposition to paywalls.

Page 13 of text:

This restructuring will mean rethinking every organizational aspect of news production—increased openness to partnerships; increased reliance on publicly available data; increased use of individuals, crowds and machines to produce raw material; even increased reliance on machines to produce some of the output.

Shirky et al should know the limitations of machine-based journalism. In case you don’t, they include possible spamming susceptibility roughly along the lines of computer-based trading on Wall Street having computers ping each other back and forth; computer inability to “read” human emotions/motives; and more. For the trio not to report on the problems that have already happened with computer-generated reporting from the human side, such as fake bylines, is simply unacceptable.

Page 22ff of text — The trio talk about the crowd as journalists, while appearing to conflate crowd journalism and crowd eyewitnessing taken to the next phase. An eyewitness with a Twitter account isn’t necessarily a journalist; often, rather, he or she is simply an eyewitness broadcasting his/her observations before being queried by a journalist. There’s really not, IMO, a huge difference between this and old-fashioned tips. There is some difference, but it’s not huge. And for the trio to not even see Twitter eyewitnesses as a continuum to this, again … they’re wanting to see what they want to see, just as I am. As for “social” breaking the reliance on old sources … maybe, or maybe new social sources soon enough become the new old sources.

Crowds and photos? How many crowds, or individuals within a crowd, know journalistic ethics on things such as not photoshopping photos?
 

Or, the guy who did the fake Tweet of false “news” in NYC during Hurricane Sandy?

Related to that, on page 88ff, the group tends to overestimate the power of social media, in specific, in things such as the Arab Spring.

Page 25ff of text — machine journalism. If it’s being done by algorithms, there’s still humans who are needed to set and tweak the algorithm’s parameters. And, as Facebook users know, some algorithms suck. They hugely suck.

On news as institutional and other things … yes, changes are still coming, even to smaller newspapers, whether desired or not. But, the money issue will still be there, and in ways that Shirky et al don’t cover.

Foundational funding, for example? What if the foundation wants particular news covered, or wants a particular “angle”? What if it doesn’t want other news covered? That said, on 108ff, the trio does discuss the issue of further blurring PR and journalism.

Page 90ff — the financial cat is out of the bag. Shirky et al clearly believe that fair use means the old “information wants to be free,” and in its normal, misquoted form.

Per a previous blog post of mine:

Just maybe, more newspaper execs (and “Webbies” in general), are reading the full paragraph that contains Stewart Brand’s “information wants to be free” statement.

If you aren’t familiar with it, I’ll post it now:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

The issue at hand is what “free” means, whether to Brand himself, or others.

Also, per this American Journalism Review article, new buyers of newspapers, for whatever reasons they’re buying them, see paywalls as part of the business-side equation.

Indeed, as I blogged last week, many such new owners, and more and more legacy owners, are simply ignoring the new media fluffers like Shirky on paywalls.

And, at bottom line, per one commenter in the AJR story, a newspaper (or a TV station, for that matter) is a business. Yes, the business part of the current model, especially on print journalism, is what’s most broken in the journalism field.

Related to that, as Evgeny Morozov and others have noted, most the new media fluffers have spent most to all their careers teaching at taxpayer-funded public universities. It’s a luxury that people actually owning media operations don’t have.

 That said, the AJR story also notes, by taking elbow-throwing rich new owners as an example, of what could go wrong with foundational funding.

Page 109ff — by giving “shoutouts” to the likes of Twitter, Wikipedia and others, aren’t the trio trying to establish new “legacy organizations”?

Page 113 — This simply doesn’t make sense:

The wastefulness of pack journalism and the empty calories of unimproved wire service news are both bad fits for most institutions in the current environment. The organizations that set out to provide a public with a large part of the news will more often be aggregators, in the manner of Huffington Post or BuzzFeed.

Uhh, aggregators still survive, in part, on the “empty calories of unimproved wire service news.” And, isn’t commentary a filter, and any alleged improvement in the eye of the beholder?

That last graf just showed me that Shirky will write what he wants to write. Touting aggregators, without even noting that much of their aggregation is still wire service, is untruthful. Also not noting that much of the rest of the aggregate is unpaid contributions, much of the rest of the rest is vanity blogging, and that Huff Post has gotten its hands slapped on fair use issues before, is more dishonesty.

Finally, let me add one other important observation.

Light at end of tunnel for papers, and more new ideas for smart paywalls

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Earlier this week, I blogged about how Matthew Ingram at GigaOm appears to have a Jeff Jarvis/Clay Shirky/Jay Rosen paywall-hating burr up his ass.

Well, per Ken Doctor at Nieman Labs, that’s a good description, because Ingram, a blind follower of the Three Musketeers of Gnu Journalism (deliberately ripped off, with same snarky intent, from Gnu Atheism) details several specific ways in which he and they are wrong.

First, especially at non-daily papers, the light is not only apparently at the end of the tunnel, but profits may actually pick up next year. As a result of that, newspaper stock prices (albeit from in-the-toilet lows) are soaring.

And, yes, even some non-dailies have paywalls. The light for dailies, definitely for smaller ones, and possibly for mid-sized ones, is at least probably getting near to a flattening out point.

Second, and directly related, Doctor details the economics of paywalls. There’s a variety of ways to skin the paywall cat. Most new adopters are going with fewer freebie reads than, say, the New York Times, and also a lot less leakiness. That includes not just small companies but as big a boy as Gannett. Doctor says opt-out provisions, in which hardcopy subscribers are automatically charged at least a nominal fee for digital access, are also growing. (I hate opt-out provisions in general, including this one, but … the idea is, nonetheless, growing.)

Third, the truth is what the Three Musketeers and hangers-on won’t tell you: paywalls are growing internationally, too.

But, even there, Doctor starts with the US side of the equation:

By the end of this year, figure that about 20 percent of the U.S.’s 1,400-plus dailies will be charging for digital access. Gannett’s February announcement that it’s going paywall at all its 80 newspapers galvanized attention; when the third largest U.S. newspaper site, the Los Angeles Times, went paid (in March), more nodding was seen in publishers’ suites.

But, that’s his takeoff point to note that (as of March) more than a dozen European dailies also had paywalls.

That, then, leads to the more significant issue. Doctor notes most paywalls are neither flaming successes nor flaming failures. So, why?

So if charging for digital access — a too long phrase, but one that’s most accurate than paywall — is neither a panacea nor a tombstone on the way to the inevitable, what is it? It’s a building block, and it’s a way to re-envision the business.

And, that’s a good point. 

Isn’t that type of creative thinking and re-envisioning what the Three Musketeers laud?

Short answer? Yes, as long as it’s done for free online.

That’s because they deliberately practice a selective quoting of only one of two sentences from Stewart Brand’s famous “Information wants to be free” comment:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Note carefully that first sentence.

Then, also per Wiki, and partially reflected on its original link, there’s the question about whether Brand meant free in terms of cost, or free in terms of access.

That, then, gets back to many critics of the Three Musketeers noting that two (Jarvis and Rosen) are paid academics, and at public, taxpayer-funded universities, no less, and therefore can easily afford to tell newspapers to let people be online leeches. Until 2010, Shirky was at the public Hunter University, so ditto on him. Let’s also not forget Shirky’s consulting for Libya’s former strongman Moammar Gadhafi, and his naivete about how autocrats could use social media to their own ends when queried about that consulting.

Update, Feb. 22, 2013: Massimo Pigliucci weighs in well on this issue. 

(Brand himself claims he's blamed for a lot of tech-neoliberalism stuff that is not his fault. The rest of that interview indicates he's lying to himself if he really believes that and lying to the rest of us anyway.)

Smarter ideas for newspaper paywalls

Matthew Ingram at GigaOm appears to have a Jeff Jarvis/Clay Shirky/Jay Rosen paywall-hating burr up his ass.

But, as I told him, his anti-paywall complaint is too narrowly focused.

One could charge a minimal general rate, plus have a freemium on top of that. Or have a metered paywall, that works like cell phones, with a minimal rate to read anything, rather than the NYT (which is so leaky as to not have a paywall) and start the meter at 0, not 10, 20 or whatever, and then ramp up rates from there. Or to be more creative, to charge more for looking at videos and stuff, take a page directly from cell phones and charge by the time spent on a page. I’m assuming that that would be easy for newspaper IT staffs to set up.

Beyond that, the real problem, of course, is that the Associated Press, largely under the leadership of the idiotic Dean Singleton, didn’t have a clue about the Internet and undercharged news aggregators for running AP material.

Since this isn’t Matt’s first anti-paywall post, in a separate comment, I said:

What’s obvious is that you, like Shirky, Rosen and other new media “gurus,” simply hate paywalls.

As for Jeff Jarvis? My left butt cheek knows more. Serious(ly), as for any specific ideas (h)e discusses, I’d Google Evgeny Morozov to see if he has some sarcastic takedown, first.

And, that’s the bottom line.

Beyond that, this is a “framing issue.” A metered paywall, a freemium wall, or anything other than a straight paywall can always be reverse-framed as a “membership” program. Hell, you can even give away PBS/NPR-type tchotchkes, if you want.

Update: Columbia Journalism Review totally agrees with me.

New media fluffers profit from dissing old media?

Just wow .... Columbia Journalism Review takes Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, et al, to the cleaners. And, the article is very good overall, not just in the claim that these and other new media fluffer leaders, through consulting fees, teaching at public universities, etc., profit, and perhaps hypocritically, by being old media dissers.

And, it's one thing to disagree on what the future of media should be. It's another to profit off of saying what the media SHOULD be, while pretending to be disinterested. And, it's yet another to ignore "concentration" in social media, ethics issues at some social media, and other factors.

Item No. 2 in the paragraph above is why I largely not just mistrust but actually dislike new media fluffers, at least the new media fluffing part of their personalities. Hey, I'm not denying the right to make a buck. BUT, be honest that your new media fluffing is anything but disinterested.

Anway, let's take a look at CJR.

I'm going to run a string of a few quotes, then start commenting;

The establishment is gloomy and old; the (Future Of Newspapers) consensus is hopeful and young (or purports to represent youth). The establishment has no plan. The FON consensus says no plan is the plan. The establishment drones on about rules and standards; the FON thinkers talk about freedom and informality. FON says “cheap” and “free”; the establishment asks for your credit card number. FON talks about “networks,” “communities,” and “love”; the establishment mutters about “institutions,” like The New York Times or mental hospitals....

The problem is that journalism’s true value-creating work, the keystone of American journalism, the principle around which it is organized, is public-interest reporting; the kind that is usually expensive, risky, stressful, and time-consuming. ...


Not only does the FON consensus have little to say about public-service journalism, it is in many ways antithetical to it. For one thing, its anti-institutionalism would disempower journalism. Jarvis and Shirky in particular have reveled in the role of intellectual undertakers/grief counselors to the newspaper industry, which, for all its many failings, has traditionally carried the public-service load.

So far, I'm in total agreement. The FON crowd largely ignores costs and overheads, as do many of their fellow travelers. And, by over-touting social media, etc., can trivialize news. (See below.)

And, is there a solution? Solutions?

Many of Shirky’s prescriptions for the economics of journalism are commonsensical and even wise. A point I find inarguable is that while some news models have been found to work in some contexts-—The Wall Street Journal’s pay wall, ProPublica’s fund-raising model (basically, one big donor), Talking Points Memo’s online ad-based system—nothing to date is scalable. There is no news business “model” at all. And who can argue with his call for constant experimentation?

I would tend to agree. And, that's why I'm not always as hard on this aspect of Shirky's thought as on Rosen's or Jarvis'.


Meanwhile, is the FON crowd counter-cultural? The story suggests so:

If some aspects of peer-production theory and its FON offshoot sound familiar—anti-institutionalism; communitarianism laced with libertarianism; a millennial, Age-of-Aquarius vibe; a certain militancy—some scholars have traced its roots to 1960s counterculture.

I'd say look to today, instead; Shirky, et al, sound like the utopian wing of Occupy Wall Street.

Meanwhile, CJR gets to "throwing under the bus" time, saying Jarvis, as example, and most the FON crowd are ... hypocritical leeches:

Like other FON thinkers, he lives the contradiction of extolling peer production and volunteerism from the security of an institution. It is doubly jarring in Jarvis’s case; an opponent of publicly funded journalism, his journalistic entrepreneurialism is, in fact, publicly subsidized. The “C” in CUNY stands for “City.”

CJR then raises a related issue: the claim that news is a commodity. Of course, the FON crowd starts with one half of Steward Brand's famous quote:

Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.

And, of course, the FON crowd is coming down emphatically, and simplistically, IMO, on the "free" side. That's why they fight paywalls, diss micropayments and other things.  But, as the CJR story notes, paywalls are working, and getting adopted by more and more dailies.

Meanwhile, here's more of that intellectual dishonesty:

I would note that there’s a point at which predicting institutional decline blurs into rooting for it, and then morphs into hastening it along, as the anti-pay wall debate shows. ... “We need the new news environment to be chaotic” to facilitate experimentation, Shirky writes. In fact, though, only consultants “need” the news environment to be chaotic.

CJN's Starkman goes on to say he expects some "media establishment" to remain in place for quite some time.

I’m going to make a bold leap and predict—eenie meenie chili beanie—that for a long time the Future of News is going to look unnervingly like the Present of News: hobbled news organizations, limping along, supplemented by swarms of new media outlets doing their best. It’s not sexy, but that’s journalism for you. 

And, here's why he's at least halfway comfortable with that statement:

It pays to remember that the most triumphalist FON works were written in 2008 and 2009, during journalism’s time of maximum panic. But now, panic time is over.

It is ... and as he says, "muddling" time continues. And, that is no thanks to the FON crowd:

The cruel truth of the emerging networked news environment is that reporters are as disempowered as they have ever been, writing more often, under more pressure, with less autonomy, about more trivial things than under the previous monopolistic regime. Indeed, if one were looking for ways to undermine reporters in their work, FON ideas would be a good place to start.

Indeed, especially about the trivialization. Working at a newspaper that thinks Facebook and Twitter posting will magically fix things seems to illustrate that. When everything is news, nothing is.

Finally, Starkman says that what he calls "Neo-institutional journalism" can be rebuilt, but that it will take work.

Shirky responds, but, IMO, as a kinder, gentler Jarvis more than anything else.

Beyond that, the new media fluffers fail to address how social media, Internet 2.0, etc. threaten us all, not just journalists, with being crushed beneath the wheel, whether like in Hesse's novel of that name or some other way.

Finally, related to this discussion, check out my  "dark side of the Internet" series of posts. None of the "new media fluffers" will fully and seriously engage with a Evgeny Morozov, Nicholas Carr or Jarod Lanier.

Blogging vs. journalism and the ‘citizen journalist’

Now that I’m in for a penny, I’m in for a pound on this issue, having done one overview post on the issue anyway.

Let me caveat this first. I'm not attacking all news bloggers, and certainly not all small-community, small-scale ones. I'm just pointing out some realities of claims that bloggers can replace traditional media, or set up a "new ecosystem" alongside of the mainstream media. (For an overview of how some of the top myths about both traditiona new media, as "sold" by new media fluffers, are wrong, go here. Bursting the bubble of the claim there's money to be made off social media in general, including new media in particular, go here. For refuting Jay Rosen's claim, regarding possible paywalls by online sites of traditional media, that they won't work, go here. [I'll confess that I long ago halfway believed Rosen and Clay Shirky on paywalls.])

I do charge that the idea of “citizen journalist,” or to spell it out more fully, “beknighted citizen journalist,” is a straw man. (And yes, I know how to spell the word; I’m deliberately rewriting it with the “k” to make a point about how New Media fluffers look at citizen journalists as knights unhorsing mainstream media. Of course, the reality is more that both the beknighted citizen journalists and their academic fluffers who have never worked at an actual newspaper a single day of their lives are actually tilting, if not at windmills, at least at straw men on the Extremadura landscape.)

John/Jane Blogger of news blogging, especially if at the local small-to-medium town level, is, if anything, at least from my anecdotal experience both at newspapers in those-sized areas and seeing bloggers at those-sized areas, more likely than “mainstream media” newspapers to have some of the reportage issues and problems, including ethical ones, that the likes of Bora, Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky and others hurl at the MSM.

First, if you’re a smaller-scale blogger, you may not know the ins and outs of libel law. Related to that, you may know and willfully not care. Some bloggers operate on the idea, I think, that “I not only don’t have deep pockets, I have zero pockets, so nobody will sue me.” And, trust me, I have seen bloggers write material that was at least on the borderline of libel. And, perhaps, do so deliberately, not out of ignorance.

Second, a news blogger may not always be careful at disaggregating straight news posts and opinion posts. Newspapers do that. It’s called the op-ed page. Now, before the cornucopian new media fluffers claim that plenty of news stories have a “slant,” see immediately above. Bloggers can and do do that too, on what they claim is straight news. Parallel to my first point, our beknighted citizen journalist may also not care about separating news from opinion, too.

Third, contra a newspaper reporter, even when allegedly writing straight news, a blogger often writes to a particular audience rather than the general public. Again, yes, in some cases, like financial reporting, and national security and foreign policy issues, the MSM does this as well, writing to insiders of the Acela Corridor. But, at the local level, this can become obvious, such as when a community is divided over the actions of a school board or a superintendent and, under the guise of reporting straight news, a blogger writes to one faction of that divide.

NOTE: NONE of the above is hypothetical. I have seen multiple instances of every one of these things, and from multiple bloggers.

Related to my third point is the fact that local politics, especially in those smaller communities, can often be personality-based at best, clannish and tribal at worst. I can tell you plenty. Texas, about 15 years ago, changed some education statutes to cut down on school boards micromanaging superintendents. Well, at a town of 4,000 in a county of less than 10,000, at one paper I edited, some people didn't like that. When the superintendent didn't hire an interim high school principal to be full time (this guy had retired several years ago), some former board members (silently abetted by a minority of the current board) took out quarter-page ads in our newspaper! And, yes, small town bloggers can play to that.

The role of editors, at newspapers of any size, are connected to this. At community newspapers, the training and ethics of a managing editor who also reports are key and invaluable. Looking for bias, pointing out bias, and writing it out of stories are important.

Finally, as a friend points out, bloggers are soloists. A modern newspaper of any size requires multiple news reporters, for several reasons. One, a reporter may need help on a story; it’s too big to tackle alone. Second, in smaller communities, at times, one editorial person may need to play good cop to a certain individual or institution while another plays bad cop. Again, from my experience at weekly newspapers where it’s a one-person editorial operation, that’s tough to do by yourself.

Coming later? More squarely addressing the money issue, and why beknighted citizen journalists, because of money and time constraints, plus the good cop/bad cop issue above, can’t generally do investigative journalism.

Five myths about news media, especially online

If you asked me to trust Clay Shirky or Tom Rosenthiel more on discussing the future of news media, I know my answer, in a flash, would be Rosenthiel. He's been doing this longer than Shirky, in a more "dedicated" fashion, and more on the ground.

Plus, unlike Shirky, Jeff Jarvis and similar, he's not a mindless booster of the Internet.

That said, here's a short take on his five myths about the news media. They include seeing the need for paywalls, because unlike Shirky et al, Rosenthiel actually is looking at media business/financial models, and, also, he recognizes that ads alone just won't pay the freight.

That said, here they are:

1. The traditional news media are losing their audience.
The 25 most popular news Web sites in the United States, for instance, all but two are “legacy” media sources, such as the New York Times or CNN, or aggregators of traditional media, such as Yahoo or Google News. ... The crisis facing traditional media is about revenue, not audience. And in that crisis, newspapers have been hardest hit: Ad revenue for U.S. newspapers fell 48 percent from 2006 to 2010.

2. Online news will be fine as soon as the advertising revenue catches up.
Such hopes are misplaced. In 2010, Web advertising in the United States surpassed print advertising for the first time, reaching $26 billion. But only a small fraction of that, perhaps less than a fifth, went to news organizations.

3. Content will always be king.
The syllogism that helped journalism prosper in the 20th century was simple: Produce the journalism (or “content”) that people want, and you will succeed. But that may no longer be enough.

The key to media in the 21st century may be who has the most knowledge of audience behavior, not who produces the most popular content.

4. Newspapers around the world are on the decline.
Actually, print circulation worldwide was up more than 5 percent in the past five years, not down, and the number of newspapers is growing. In general, print media are thriving in the developing world and suffering in rich nations.

By and large, American newspapers are suffering the most. Roughly 75 percent of their revenue comes from advertising, vs. 30 percent or 40 percent in many other countries, where papers live and die by circulation. That means the collapse of advertising is not hitting papers elsewhere as hard as it is hitting them here. It also suggests that the need to charge for online access may be even more important abroad.

5. The solution is to focus on local news.
Going “hyperlocal” was the war cry of Wall Street to the news industry five years ago. The reasoning was simple: In the Internet age, when users can access content from anywhere, it didn’t make sense for local operations to compete with the big national news providers.

The problem is that hyperlocal content, by definition, has limited appeal. To amass an audience large enough to generate significant ad revenue, you have to produce a large volume of content from different places, and that is expensive. On top of that, many hyperlocal advertisers are not yet online, limiting the ad dollars.

Now we are entering what might be called Hyperlocal 2.0, and the market is still up for grabs. Google, which garners two-thirds of all search advertising dollars nationally, doesn’t exert similar control over local advertising. Locally, display ads — all those banners and pop-ups — are a bigger share of the market than search ads.

But how to produce local content remains a mystery. ... So far, no one has really cracked the code for producing profitable local news online.

Nos 2 and 5 are pretty much direct blasts at Shirky. And I agree on both. No. 3 is the troublesome one, to a news idealist. That said, much of what the MSM pumped out in the past was news-lite anyway.

Overall, thoughk this is a good overview.

Five myths about news media, especially online

If you asked me to trust Clay Shirky or Tom Rosenthiel more on discussing the future of news media, I know my answer, in a flash, would be Rosenthiel. He's been doing this longer than Shirky, in a more "dedicated" fashion, and more on the ground.

Plus, unlike Shirky, Jeff Jarvis and similar, he's not a mindless booster of the Internet.

That said, here's a short take on his five myths about the news media. They include seeing the need for paywalls, because unlike Shirky et al, Rosenthiel actually is looking at media business/financial models, and, also, he recognizes that ads alone just won't pay the freight.

That said, here they are:

1. The traditional news media are losing their audience.
The 25 most popular news Web sites in the United States, for instance, all but two are “legacy” media sources, such as the New York Times or CNN, or aggregators of traditional media, such as Yahoo or Google News. ... The crisis facing traditional media is about revenue, not audience. And in that crisis, newspapers have been hardest hit: Ad revenue for U.S. newspapers fell 48 percent from 2006 to 2010.

2. Online news will be fine as soon as the advertising revenue catches up.
Such hopes are misplaced. In 2010, Web advertising in the United States surpassed print advertising for the first time, reaching $26 billion. But only a small fraction of that, perhaps less than a fifth, went to news organizations.

3. Content will always be king.
The syllogism that helped journalism prosper in the 20th century was simple: Produce the journalism (or “content”) that people want, and you will succeed. But that may no longer be enough.

The key to media in the 21st century may be who has the most knowledge of audience behavior, not who produces the most popular content.

4. Newspapers around the world are on the decline.
Actually, print circulation worldwide was up more than 5 percent in the past five years, not down, and the number of newspapers is growing. In general, print media are thriving in the developing world and suffering in rich nations.

By and large, American newspapers are suffering the most. Roughly 75 percent of their revenue comes from advertising, vs. 30 percent or 40 percent in many other countries, where papers live and die by circulation. That means the collapse of advertising is not hitting papers elsewhere as hard as it is hitting them here. It also suggests that the need to charge for online access may be even more important abroad.

5. The solution is to focus on local news.
Going “hyperlocal” was the war cry of Wall Street to the news industry five years ago. The reasoning was simple: In the Internet age, when users can access content from anywhere, it didn’t make sense for local operations to compete with the big national news providers.

The problem is that hyperlocal content, by definition, has limited appeal. To amass an audience large enough to generate significant ad revenue, you have to produce a large volume of content from different places, and that is expensive. On top of that, many hyperlocal advertisers are not yet online, limiting the ad dollars.

Now we are entering what might be called Hyperlocal 2.0, and the market is still up for grabs. Google, which garners two-thirds of all search advertising dollars nationally, doesn’t exert similar control over local advertising. Locally, display ads — all those banners and pop-ups — are a bigger share of the market than search ads.

But how to produce local content remains a mystery. ... So far, no one has really cracked the code for producing profitable local news online.

Nos 2 and 5 are pretty much direct blasts at Shirky. And I agree on both. No. 3 is the troublesome one, to a news idealist. That said, much of what the MSM pumped out in the past was news-lite anyway.

Overall, thoughk this is a good overview.

The Dark Side of the Internet - Part 2 - political activism

Yesterday, I took a long look at whether the Internet lived up to the hype of cyberutopians Clay Shirky and Michael Shermer, and if not, how far short it fell.

Well, now, I'd like to take a bit more of a look at one particular issue within this, and that's whether or not the Net really empowers people politically, whether it primarily promotes slacktivism.

The entree to that?

Via a Facebook discussion, here's a dystopian take on Internet skeptic Evgeny Morozov as being over-dystopian.

Morozov thinks that the “ridiculously easy group-forming” that his leading nemesis Clay Shirky described in his recent book Cognitive Surplus is, in reality, leading largely to cognitive crap, at least as it pertains to civic action and political activism. Indeed, at one point in Chapter 7 (the creatively-titled, “Why Kierkegaard Hates Slacktivism”), Morozov speaks of the development of what we might think of as a “tragedy of the civic commons” (my term, not his). ...

But this ignores many legitimate forms of social organization / protesting that have been facilitated by the Net and digital technologies. Despite what Morozov suggests, we haven’t all become lethargic, asocial, apolitical cave-dwelling Baywatch­ rerun-watching junkies. If all Netizens are just hooked on a cyber-sedative that saps their civic virtue, what are we to make of the millions of progressives who so successfully used the Net and digital technologies to organize and elect President Obama? (Believe me, I wish they wouldn’t have been so civic-minded and rushed to the polls in record numbers to elect that guy!)

The main takeaway I get from this review of Morozov is that the reviewer thinks he's being too dismissive of the possibility of the Internet transforming democratic action.

I disagree. I think, at least in the democratic U.S., governments have found new stasis or equilibrium, a la this"hype cycle" graphic.

Above the level of a small-town city council, do governments even take notice of e-mail action alert e-mails any more? Do you think they do? Do you, like me, assume they don't, and so participate in fewer such campaigns?

My guess is that staffers at congressional offices and such look at those e-mails, then go to environmental, civil liberties and other activist organization websites, and look at the "standard language" suggested by the agency, then discount all e-mails based on that.

I'm guessing that federal bureaus and agencies act similarly.

I'm also guessing that, in larger states, state elected officials' offices and state agencies are doing that more and more.

Ditto on Twitter feeds, if they see thousands of Tweets linking to the same bit.ly or tinyurl.com webpage.

In other words, government is screening you out.

That said, an old-fashioned phone call reaches either a real person, or a real-person's human-voiced voice mail. And, other than the higher tech of cellphones vs. landlines making it a bit easier to do the call, though no easier to speak, there's no tech advance here.

Or, are you a bit more skeptical of human psychology than that, even? Do you believe the ease of an e-mail alert is a salve for the conscience, an easy "indulgence" similar to buying carbon credits rather than taking real action against global warming? (See here for my thoughts on carbon credit indulgences.)

I do.

In other words, does the Internet have a tendency to foster "slacktivism"? Possibly, even quite possibly. Is that better than nothing at all? Yes. How much better will decide whether you lean toward Morozov or Shirky.

Now, I don't claim to have the answers for something more than that, but, I do think that's another fact that Net utopians don't address. In short, Shirky's utopianism about the Net is matched, possibly, by a utopianism about human nature.

But, not all governments are semi-transparent to transparent. What about authoritarian or totalitarian ones?

Again, from the review:

Morozov says modern China, Putin’s Russia and Hugo Chavez are embracing new digital technologies in an attempt to better control them or learn how to use them to better spy on their citizens, and he implies that this is just another way they will dupe the citizenry and seduce them into a slumber so they will avert their eyes and ears to the truth of the repression that surrounds them. Sorry, but once again, I’m not buying it.

Here, Adam Thierer seems ignorant of 19th-century European history.

I don't know about France, but, places further east, after the rise of daily newspapers in larger cities, provide an instructional parallel.

Rather than ban newspapers outright, or even censor them to near the point of being unintelligible, governments such as the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary let leading newspapers of the left stay on racks at coffeehouses and other high-traffic public places precisely so they could keep tabs on who appeared subversive, what information was getting the most reading, etc.

And, presumably, in exchange for letting such places stay in business, occasionally leaning on their owners to rat out a few patrons to stay in business.

Now, Morozov may be overstating the case with the idea that Chavez is, or can be, "duping" people. There, I would agree with Thierer. Somewhat. But, not nearly totally.

As I noted in my original post, a leaked e-mail from HBGary, one of the companies that wanted to spy on “Anonymous” and online supporters of it and Julian Assange, showed it has plans to ramp up corporate online sockpuppetry to a whole new level.

Now, Venezuela or Iran may not have consultancy companies with this level of expertise, or folks inside its government, to pull off something similar. But, you can bet Hu Jintao's China and Vladimir Putin's Russia do.

Speaking of, it now (3/20/11) seems China is blocking Gmail. Another nail in the coffin of Net utopians, as well as that of transationalists.

Again, Thierer should read some history of 100-plus years ago.

The Okhrana, the Czarist predecessor to the KGB, was notorious for its use of human agents provacateur. They included the man who assassinated Prime Minister Pytor Stolypin in 1911.

The use of fake Tweeters, fake Facebookers, etc. to do similar by electronic means should be seriously considered by the U.S. foreign policy establishment when monitoring unrest, or apparent unrest, in these countries, in fact.

But, at the same time, we don't need to go abroad, or leave the land of democracy, to talk about governments abusing the Internet

I mentioned HB Gary above. We don't even need to do that.

Under the Bush Administration (and perhaps still ongoing with Team Obama), the FBI spied on, harassed, and even arrested on flimsy charges individuals involved in peace/antiwar groups. How much of that was enabled by electronic snooping, or even electronic sockpuppetry?

And, let's not forget the Patriot Act itself and the Internet spying it allows.

For Shirky to write his utopian BS without even discussing that? Unconscionable. If the mainstream media did something like that, he'd be vomiting all over the Internet.

The Dark Side of the Internet — and social media

Now, I'm not a Luddite, either neo or paleo.

But, I'm also not a Kurzweilian, either, expecting technology to get us all living to 300 with Viagra-free perfect sexual activity. (And, that’s happening in just 30 years, says Kurzweil, with Time magazine dumb enough to give him its cover on that subject.)

So, while I appreciate making online friends, applying for jobs online, learning new things online, shopping online and more ...

I won't ignore that there IS a dark side to the Internet, even if not all of it is Orwellian. (Note: This may become a series — part 2 is here.)

Or, there's flip sides to coins, at least. And, the dark sides may be less harmful and more pedestrian than anything else. And, are in part "dark sides" only in comparison to a relentless, nearly fact-free boosterism of Internet utopians like Clay Shirky.

Take online shopping.

The flip side? Online ads becoming ever more pervasive. Online violations of private information growing and becoming more aggressive. And, in light of that, let me repeat my assertion that "Brave New World" is equally seminal as "1984,"if not more so.

And, I’m not alone in that.

“Is the Internet Changing the Way We Think?”, edited by John Brockman, the founder of the online science-and-technology site Edge.org, discusses a lot of these issues, as this Wall Street Journal review notes.

Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher, argues that the Internet isn't changing the way we think; it is exacerbating the deceptively simple challenge of "attention management." "Attention is a finite commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life," he argues. The way we use the Internet today represents "not only an organized attack on the space of consciousness per se but also a mild form of depersonalization. . . . I call it public dreaming."

These are not the laments of technophobes. MIT professor Rodney Brooks, an expert on robotics, worries that the Internet "is stealing our attention. It competes for it with everything else we do." Neuroscientist Brian Knutson imagines a near future in which "the Internet may impose a 'survival of the focused,' in which individuals gifted with some natural ability to stay on target, or who are hopped up on enough stimulants, forge ahead while the rest of us flail helpless in a Web-based attentional vortex." …
The substitution of the virtual for the real is another common theme. Paleontologist Scott Sampson worries about "the loss of intimate experience with the natural world." And computer scientist Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, says that the Internet has "become gripped by reality-denying ideology." Several of the book's contributors, particularly artists and architects, make solid arguments for the importance of unmediated experiences to the creative process. …

(Update: At the same time, Lanier is himself some sort of tech-neolib, who is dumb enough, naive enough, or on the take enough to assume that Big Data will give you or I micropayments for using its services.)

Beyond worrying about the Internet, at least one person in the book tells us not to overrate it:

The neuroscientist Joshua Greene suggests, in a blunt but apt metaphor, that the Internet, for all its revolutionary pretense, is "nothing more, and nothing less, than a very useful, and very dumb, butler.

Clay Shirky, below, can't fit "butler" or "robot" in his cyber-utopianism. I'll get to that later.

Meanwhile, there's the dark side of Twitter.

Lee Siegel immediately notes one issue:

Just a few years ago, all anyone could talk about was how to make the Internet more free. Now all anyone can talk about is how to control it.

it's a good start to his review of Evgeny Morozov's “The Net Delusion.”

He shows how American naivete and chauvinism have mixed to worship at the altar of Twitter:

He quotes the political blogger Andrew Sullivan, who proclaimed after protesters took to the streets in Tehran that “the revolution will be Twittered.” The revolution never happened, and the futilely tweeting protesters were broken with an iron hand. But Sullivan was hardly the only one to ignore the Iranian context. Clay Shirky, the media’s favorite quotable expert on all things Internet-related, effused: “This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.”

Frank Rich knows the truth.

The talking-head invocations of Twitter and Facebook instead take the form of implicit, simplistic Western chauvinism. How fabulous that two great American digital innovations can rescue the downtrodden, unwashed masses. That is indeed impressive if no one points out that, even in the case of the young and relatively wired populace of Egypt, only some 20 percent of those masses have Internet access.

Rich also implies that American teevee, as opposed to the effectively banned-from-America Al Jazeera, relies on foreign Tweeters out of collective corporate laziness:

That we often don’t know as much about the people in these countries as we do about their Tweets is a testament to the cutbacks in foreign coverage at many news organizations — and perhaps also to our own desire to escape a war zone that has for so long sapped American energy, resources and patience.

Meanwhile, the Internet in America is not that ethical:

As Morozov points out, don’t expect corporations like Google to liberate anyone anytime soon. Google did business in China for four years before economic conditions and censorship demands — not human rights concerns — forced it out. And it is telling that both Twitter and Facebook have refused to join the Global Network Initiative, a pact that Morozov describes as “an industrywide pledge . . . to behave in accordance with the laws and standards covering the right to freedom of expression and privacy embedded in internationally recognized documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

So, let’s not expect the Internet to radically change the ethos of American business.

To some degree, I suspect early expectations of the Internet were in part a mix of American naivete, salvific technologism and American exceptionalism that all overlapped, and are now facing reality.

Yet more on the dark side of the Net from the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, reviewing Clay Shirky's new book, as well as Morozov's.

This is a great overview of a variety of books, some claiming this is the best of times for human psychology and more, some saying the brain in some ways just can't keep pace, and some saying its six of one, a half dozen of the other.

(A)mong the new books about the Internet (there are three types): call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers.

In the first category? A book by new media fluffer Clay Shirky and an essay Pop Ev Psycher (yes, you are) John Tooby, both make ignorant claims about the early egalitarianism and humanism of the printing press, among other things.

Shirky’s and Tooby’s version of Never-Betterism has its excitements, but the history it uses seems to have been taken from the back of a cereal box. The idea, for instance, that the printing press rapidly gave birth to a new order of information, democratic and bottom-up, is a cruel cartoon of the truth. If the printing press did propel the Reformation, one of the biggest ideas it propelled was Luther’s newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism. And what followed the Reformation wasn’t the Enlightenment, a new era of openness and freely disseminated knowledge. What followed the Reformation was, actually, the Counter-Reformation, which used the same means—i.e., printed books—to spread ideas about what jerks the reformers were, and unleashed a hundred years of religious warfare.

I'll pass on both. As for Shirky, if he can't get the founding instrument of media, and its early influence on society, right, how can we trust his pronunciamentos on media today? Of course, we can't.

Meanwhile, Shirky's naive wiki-touting gets demolished:

In a practical, immediate way, one sees the limits of the so-called “extended mind” clearly in the mob-made Wikipedia, the perfect product of that new vast, supersized cognition: when there’s easy agreement, it’s fine, and when there’s widespread disagreement on values or facts, as with, say, the origins of capitalism, it’s fine, too; you get both sides. The trouble comes when one side is right and the other side is wrong and doesn’t know it. The Shakespeare authorship page and the Shroud of Turin page are scenes of constant conflict and are packed with unreliable information. Creationists crowd cyberspace every bit as effectively as evolutionists, and extend their minds just as fully. Our trouble is not the over-all absence of smartness but the intractable power of pure stupidity, and no machine, or mind, seems extended enough to cure that.

Gopnik then tackels the "Better-Nevers" In brief:

The books by the Better-Nevers are more moving than those by the Never-Betters for the same reason that Thomas Gray was at his best in that graveyard: loss is always the great poetic subject.

He doesn't review Morozov, but his book would probably fall halfway here, halfway in the Better-Waser group, which says the Net isn't a utopia, but we've heard similar complaints about other technology.

Chris Lehmann has a similar review of Shirky, with some Morozov, at The Nation.

Lehmann labels Shirky as not only a hand-waving utopian optimist, but a vignette-as-authoritarian writer of the same ilk as Malcolm Gladwell. It’s also clear that Shirky has more than a touch of the economic libertarian in him, deriding, or seeming to, much of the liberal-developed social contract of the last century or so in the U.S and elsewhere in the western world.

Meanwhile, a leaked e-mail from HBGary, one of the companies that wanted to spy on “Anonymous” and online supporters of it and Julian Assange, shows it has plans to ramp up corporate online sockpuppetry to a whole new level. So much for Shirky's alleged Internet egalitarianism.

Via Jim Lippard, here's a dystopian take on Morozov as being over-dystopian.

The main takeaway I get from this review of Morozov is that the reviewer thinks he's being too dismissive of the possibility of the Internet transforming democratic action.

I disagree. I think, at least in the democratic U.S., governments have found new stasis or equilibrium, a la the "hype cycle" graphic Lippard mentioned.

Above the level of a small-town city council, do governments even take notice of e-mail action alert e-mails any more? Do you think they do? Do you, like me, assume they don't, and so participate in fewer such campaigns?

Or, are you a bit more skeptical of human psychology than that, even? Do you believe the ease of an e-mail alert is a salve for the conscience, an easy "indulgence" similar to buying carbon credits rather than taking real action against global warming? (See here for my thoughts on carbon credit indulgences.)

I do.

In other words, does the Internet have a tendency to foster "slacktivism"? Yes. Is that better than nothing at all? Yes. How much better will decide whether you lean toward Morozov or Shirky.

Now, I don't claim to have the answers for something more than that, but, I do think that's another fact that Net utopians don't address. In short, Shirky's utopianism about the Net is matched, possibly, by a utopianism about human nature.

But, at the same time, we don't need to go abroad, or leave the land of democracy, to talk about governments abusing the Internet

I mentioned HB Gary above. We don't even need to do that.

Under the Bush Administration (and perhaps still ongoing with Team Obama), the FBI spied on, harassed, and even arrested on flimsy charges individuals involved in peace/antiwar groups. How much of that was enabled by electronic snooping, or even electronic sockpuppetry?

And, let's not forget the Patriot Act itself and the Internet spying it allows.

For Shirky to write his utopian BS without even discussing that? Unconscionable. If the mainstream media did something like that, he'd be vomiting all over the Internet.

Anyway, the reality is that 20 years from now, much of the Net will be Russian, Chinese and Nigeria spammers talking to each other anyway.

So, the portion of the Net that’s not foreign money spammers 20 years from now will be Big Biz PR spammers. Or, speaking of Russia and China, more and more of it will be cyberwarfare.

Update: Add alleged skeptic, but real pseudoskeptic, Michael Shermer, to the list of cyberutopians. He's so bad he believes Ray Kurzweiil's prediction that the Singularity will arrive by 2030.

Tom Freidman, flat-Twitter asshat

Teapot Tommy Friedman, Mr. Earth is Flat, in talking about Twitter, Egypt and related issues, is even dumber, more uninformed, and more American-exceptionalist chauvinistic than usual, and that's hard to imagine!

Here's the nut graf on his stupidity:

The Arab world has 100 million young people today between the ages of 15 and 29, many of them males who do not have the education to get a good job, buy an apartment and get married. That is trouble. Add in rising food prices, and the diffusion of Twitter, Facebook and texting, which finally gives them a voice to talk back to their leaders and directly to each other, and you have a very powerful change engine.

Just one problem. There IS no "diffusion of Twitter." The reality of Iran's failed Green Revolution showed that, as did the reality of Egypt's protests becoming stronger after President Mubarak shut down the country's ISPs.

Fortunately, Friedman's colleague, Frank Rich, knows the truth.

The talking-head invocations of Twitter and Facebook instead take the form of implicit, simplistic Western chauvinism. How fabulous that two great American digital innovations can rescue the downtrodden, unwashed masses. That is indeed impressive if no one points out that, even in the case of the young and relatively wired populace of Egypt, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/01/how-wired-are-egyptians.html of those masses have Internet access.

Rich also implies that American teevee, as opposed to the effectively banned-from-America Al Jazeera, relies on foreign Tweeters out of collective corporate laziness:

That we often don’t know as much about the people in these countries as we do about their Tweets is a testament to the cutbacks in foreign coverage at many news organizations — and perhaps also to our own desire to escape a war zone that has for so long sapped American energy, resources and patience.

He's not the only person writing for the NYT to know the truth about Twitter, too.

Lee Siegel immediately notes one issue:

Just a few years ago, all anyone could talk about was how to make the Internet more free. Now all anyone can talk about is how to control it.

it's a good start to his review of Evgeny Morozov's “The Net Delusion.”

He shows how American naivete and chauvinism have mixed to worship at the altar of Twitter:

He quotes the political blogger Andrew Sullivan, who proclaimed after protesters took to the streets in Tehran that “the revolution will be Twittered.” The revolution never happened, and the futilely tweeting protesters were broken with an iron hand. But Sullivan was hardly the only one to ignore the Iranian context. Clay Shirky, the media’s favorite quotable expert on all things Internet-related, effused: “This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.”

The more I read out of Shirky's mouth, the less and less intellectual capacity I will give him credit. It's like he is a fellator of anything called "New Media." But, that's pretty much the case with his whole tribe of Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen types.

Selling out to Pepsi in the name of science

I'm a bit late to the controversy about top science mag and science online presence Seed essentially selling blogging space to PepsiCo. (Fortunately, that offer has been withdrawn.)

That said, it leads me to two observations.

One, given that Seed does appear to be hurting financially, is about ... a bete noire of mine ... online paywalls.

And, it led me to think of two quasi bete noires of new media punditry, Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky.

Both of them, for all their commentary on the future of media, have failed to fully address the financial issues from all sides, IMO. That's why, though paywalls aren't perfect, it's an issue I hammer and hammer. Google has driven online ad prices lower and lower. HuffPost and elsewhere has shown, more than once, the conflict-of-interest issues that can arise with "donor media" on the nonprofit side. So, that means other financial models have to be investigated. (And, in dismissing paywalls, Rosen/Shirky have only attacked monolithic paywalls or micropayments; to the best of my knowledge, neither has really discussed the "metered flexwall" that a place like The Economist has.)

The second is that, Examiner, Suite101, etc. are showing how to ruin this model even further with SEO-targeted "writing." Not only does it lower the quality of writing, it sends more writing chasing after Google-lowered ad dollars.