[SL: After qualifying as a lawyer, Ken Nielsen switched to management and spent most of his career in the food business in Australia and Asia. In 2002 he and his wife Liz accidentally set up an opera company: www.pinchgutopera.com.au]
You can, for a small price, download me from iTunes. I don’t sing, play an instrument or even hum in tune. In 2004 I took part in an ABC TV documentary in its Four Corners series called ‘Beating the Black Dog‘. Four of us spoke of our experiences with depression and how we managed it. The conclusions were, on the whole, positive – the Black Dog can be overcome or at least kept under control.
I wanted to pass the programme on to some people who might find it useful so after it went to air I asked Janine Cohen, the producer, for a couple of copies. She sent me VHS tapes. Remember VHS tapes? I have had it on my list of things to do to transfer it to DVD but now I need not bother. ABC TV has put a selection of its notable programmes on iTunes, available for download for $A2.99. (Search iTunes under “Beating the Black Dog”.) The transcript is also available, free, from the ABC website.
I have only one problem about the programme being archived. Since I appeared on Four Corners, I have managed to lose quite a bit of weight. I wonder if there is a video editing application, like Photoshop, that would allow me to remove my double chin from the online version of the programme?
The iTunes discovery got me thinking all over again about where the internet will take us. It is valuable to have material like this available long after broadcast. The BBC does something similar with iPlayer though its TV programmes are not available outside the UK. Many radio programmes are available as podcasts. Newspapers no longer disappear around the next day’s fish and chips: most are archived online and available free or for a small charge.
I suppose I was an early adopter of the internet, if you include fiddling around in the early 90s with the pre world wide web text system called Gopher. I found it fascinating but I could not work out what it was for. Nearly all of the content seemed to be about how to use the internet. I did come across an online lunch menu for the student canteen in Lund (where the son of some friends was studying) but that did not hold my attention very long.
So when I read a book called Silicon Snake Oil by Clifford Stoll suggesting that most of the stuff written about the internet (it was 1994) was a beatup and it would probably not lead anywhere, I was sympathetic. Stoll pointed out that online was no substitute for real life and that library card indexes are beautiful and useful things. I remained curious about the net but could not hazard any predictions about where it would go. I was an interested skeptic.
There are though thousands of people and organisations that cannot afford just to look on with interest. The survival of newspapers, magazines, radio stations and TV networks as well as the careers of those working for them depends on their owners and managers making the right choices about where to put effort and resources. No-one seems to have it worked out yet. Newspapers are the most at sea. They are losing advertising, especially classified, at a fast rate and none has yet found a workable business model. So most try to cut costs, including writers and news-gathering, which does not seem a sensible thing to do.
Rupert Murdoch is the only owner who has strong faith in print yet even he has not decided whether to make online content free, as most papers do, or charge, as he does with Wall Street Journal. News magazines are almost dead but magazines with meaty content – The Economist, New Yorker and Atlantic are examples – are doing fairly well. No TV network has discovered a recipe for survival under the new rules. The current recession will surely test them.
These business problems exist against the background of a battle between the professional media, in which the content providers are working for a living, and the large mass of amateur content, including blogs, newsletters, online specialist content as well as Wikipedia. This fight, and the professionals’ worries about the possible result, have produced several books. Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur is worth buying and keeping alongside Clifford Stoll’s book. Both will, I believe, make funny reading in ten years’ time. Philip Adams — who would a few years ago have violently objected to being described as part of the mass media — recently wrote a column in The Australian telling how the world as we know it will come to an end as mass media is replaced by the ‘mess media’.
All this is quite understandable. Drivers of horse-drawn cabs no doubt said similar things when cars first appeared. For the rest of us all this is fascinating, rewarding and at times funny. Still, it does seem a bit cowardly to get the benefits from the net and enjoy the discomfort of those in the mainstream media without making some guesses about where it is all going. So (knowing that I will probably look foolish quite soon) here are my predictions:
1.There will be a continuing demand for much of the material that is now in mainstream media. Perhaps raw news will go to news services’ sites. AFP and Bloomberg already do a pretty good job. A large part of the news in the daily papers comes from the services, so it probably makes sense to cut out the middle-man. But original professional content, such as features, specialist supplements and opinion (though most papers desperately need to improve their opinion pages which in most cases have become boring and predictable) will survive in some form.
2. For what remains in mainstream media online, the online advertising model is unlikely to provide a strong enough revenue stream to pay for the content they need. Craigslist and the like will take much of the classified business and Google the highly targeted ads, leaving not much for the papers. So the subscription model is probably unavoidable.
3. Well-written magazines, providing material that no one else can produce and deliver presented in with glossy advertising will do well.
4. Though no one seems to be paying much attention, there are fascinating things happening with net radio. You can listen to a streamed version of almost every radio station in the world through your computer. On a recent flight across the US in an aircraft equipped with wifi, I listened though my iPod to 3MBS, a Melbourne community classical music station. I have no idea whether this is significant or just a curiosity. I also have no idea what will happen to TV, already being fragmented by cable and satellite delivery systems. I once ran a business spending many millions on TV advertising. I would not do that now but would not have any idea how to communicate with consumers.
I once showed the internet to my father. He’s a pilot so I demonstrated an online flight planning system. He was impressed, but asked ‘Who’s paying for all this?’ I explained that I paid for access but that the content was free. ‘Someone must be paying for it’, he insisted. He was right, and his question still has not been answered.
30 Comments
Interesting to see how these people end up making money. NYTimes is almost broke and there are, I read recently, over 100 newspapers for sale in the US at the moment.
I’m not quite sure if people will rely solely on the wholesalers like Reuters etc for their raw news as they are so damned slanted and biased.
There are often rumors that the NYTimes will soon simply migrate to the web and if that’s true it will be an amazing development.
Worthless mastheads will simply go down the drain as other than say the Fin Review who needs to read The Age anymore.
I’m not quite with you on the open air channels and I think my argument carries over to newspapers to a certain degree.
What a good newspaper and open air channel does well is scrutinize for “taste” as most people really don’t have enough time to go searching around the web for a good program or analyzed news piece.
That’s where their value added lies and it’s really no different to what they should have been doing in the first place which was/is to give value to the customer. Odd No?
This is the thing, Ken.
They have to make themselves indispensable to the customer and as yet only a few mastheads have been able to achieve that.
I pay for a subscription to the WSJ and the FT and Barrons because they are so damned good at what they do.
I will not however pay for a sub to The Age or the SMH because they are hopelessly boring at what they do.
As a left wing rag the Guardian is pretty good and fast becoming a global mast head. That’s the sort of thing that ought to be happening, otherwise they won’t survive.
Jeezus JC… a serious comment!
I agree.
BTW…I didn’t know the NYTimes is in strife.
“there are fascinating things happening with net radio”
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I completely agree with you on this — especially the fact that there’s very little said about this compared to print media. Once bandwidth becomes cheaper, I imagine this will seriously impact many stations that have no particular niche (the big commercial ones being the obvious ones that will be most affected — who is going to listen to a station riddled with adds and other such junk like Fox when they can hear the same music without such things? I also imagine classical channels like MBS which are essentially the same all over the world will also be in difficulty).
“I have only one problem about the programme being archived. Since I appeared on Four Corners, I have managed to lose quite a bit of weight.”
, so it gave them a good laugh.
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Haha. You’ll live (you can use it as a memento to being able to lose weight in the long term — quite a difficult thing to do for many). I had a similar experience recently — my students managed to find a picture of me from the 1990s, when I had long hair and looked cool and alternative (and rather passe for 2009). Now I’m just a disgusting slob (not quite, but I look somehwhat normal
NYTimes is in huge strife. It will be a complete disaster if it goes under, it is one of the most well-written newspapers in the world and consistently contains interesting feature and comment/analysis articles.
To a certain extent. There is plenty of content on-line which is free because, well, it’s free. For example, you can jump on Flickr right now and find a “free” picture of virtually anything you like. It’s free because someone has chosen to go to the effort of taking that picture and then posted it there for others to enjoy. So although there is still some infrastructure involved (hosting all those images must cost a bit), CC-licensed pictures on Flickr are distinguishable from, say, a newspaper, where the creation of the content is complex, expensive, and has to happen in a particular way on a particular schedule for it to be useful. So in my mind, there is no reason why a great deal of information cannot be essentially free or at least extremely cheap to access on-line, with the only real cost being the means of storage and communication of the data.
Something like an on-line flight planning system likewise does not have to cost anyone anything. Someone might have written it simply because it was useful to them, and it costs them nothing or very little to share it with the rest of the world.
Open source software is another example – there are dozens of perfectly usable operating systems which for most people (if they only knew) would be a perfectly good substitute for Windows or OSX or whatever they currently use. These are all entirely free, and are the product of thousands of people happily donating their time to make something worthwhile.
Incidentally – I predict we will see the rise of highly distributed data storage systems in order to reduce or eliminate the costs of hosting data. For instance, if every computer on the net agrees to host a small amount of data and pass it on to anyone in the area who is after that particular data, then it will be possible to a great extent for systems like Flickr to be free even in the sense of hosting and communication. Every user will be bearing a portion of the cost of the infrastructure by paying for their internet connection, and no one person or entity will have to bear the whole of the hosting cost for the data.
This type of thing is already happening via the distribution of (legitimate) content via bittorrent.
Paul: Sure, I think it’s wonderful that there is so much free material online.
The problem is that the-things-formerly-known-as -newspapers have not found a way to gain an income stream as they move online. Advertising is fairly insignificant and for all the reasons you set out, people by and large won’t pay for online content.
Citizen journalists and bloggers – excellent though many of them are – cannot provide all of the stuff we are in the habit of expecting from the dead tree media.
I don’t believe the NYT will disappear. The risk (likelihood?) is that cost cutting will reduce the flow of well though out and meaty articles it does so well.
That is also why it is encouraging that New Yorker, Atlantic and such are staying above water.
It’s complicated. I think newspapers are on the way out, but stuffed if I know what’s going to replace them. Obviously there is still a market for news of the AP/Bloomberg type, and bloggers do opinion-editorial better than newspapers do (a fair point, Ken). It’s just I don’t see how the bloggers and the news-coverage are going to meet in the middle. There must be a way to do it AND make money, but no-one else has figured it out yet.
Ken, a lot of stuff online is paid for. The online booking system, for example, will be developed, updated and hosted by the airline concerned. It is a service they offer customers. But Paul is right – a huge amount of online content is developed and uploaded by people in their own time, so the costs can’t be commercially assessed. Mind you, many of the people who develop open source software do it after their day jobs, in which they work for software developers. So you could make a case that software developers subsidise open source software, because they train, develop and maintain the skills of the open source developers.
The words ‘produsers’ and ‘prosumers’ are being used for the phenomenon of users who create – the same people are both producing and using/consuming content.
In April, just short of its hundredth anniversary, The Christian Science Monitor well be shifting to largely web- and email-based publication with a print edition only once a week instead of daily.
The Monitor has long been subsidised by the Christian Science church and the move is expected to substantially reduce the subsidy required. Its paper circulation is largely by mail so the issues that it faces are rather different from a typical newspaper. More about the move at http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1029/p25s01-usgn.html
The Guardian newspaper’s publisher has an unusual structure, being owned by a non-profit entity. The Scott Trust, (now the Scott Trust Ltd) was created in 1936 by then owner of the newspaper, C P Scott.
As a now diversified group it continues to be profitable, funding the Scott Trust Foundation and ploughing the balance of its profit back into its business.
It seems to be managing transition to the web world smoothly. Although the Guardian/Observer division made a loss last year, both print and digital advertising revenues increased and the loss was more than offset by other divisions of the organisation.
Two thirds of its web site readership is now from outside the UK, suggesting that, somehow, there may be scope for increased revenue from international readers.
http://www.gmgplc.co.uk/media/pressreleases/tabid/213/default.aspx?pressreleaseid=120&cid=viewdetails
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gnm-archive/2002/jun/06/1
M-H Yes, the fact that so much is free to the user has created the expectation that everything should be free.
That’s neither good nor bad. The problem is that if we want newspapers – or something like them in a different form – they need to figure out a way of making money. Papers now are largely paid for by advertising and that won’t work any more. I have no idea what it will be tho I am cheering for Rupert M who believes in print. He is perhaps the only media proprietor who believes in anything any more.
The CSM and the Guradian are interesting models but rare.
One concern is that governments will decide (or be convinced) to follow the ABC/BBC model and have a taxpayer supported newspaper. That would be scary.
Speaking of which …
In the case of this site and Andrew Norton, yours truly pays for the cost of hosting and bandwidth. It’s pretty affordable given their (in global terms) modest visitor numbers.
Troppo has a sweet arrangement where a physical server is housed and nurtured by the University Computer Club of UWA.
SL
On the possible “touching up” of physiognomy, I was wondering the same, last Saturday night, as I watched Christie Allen tear up the Countdown stage, with her miming of the 1980s Number 1 smash “Goose Bumps”.
The poor thing must cry every time she watches it. “I rack my brain, I tear my hair…he has a cardiac-arresting staaarrre”. Perhaps Meg Ryan was inspired by this moment in When Harry Met Sally.?
“He’s my Number 1, now I can’t say more. 100/100 is highest mark. You can score…..”
I think it was Nicholas Negroponte who proposed the idea of The Daily Me in his book Being Digital. In this scenario instead of buying a paper with a bulk of section in which one has no interest one instead subscribes only to those parts of newspapers or magazines one actually wants. This is all predicated on the existence of downloaded magazines or digital paper or some such. Negroponte’s predictions were a little shaky of course. He wrote that book in 1990 (I seem to recall) and declared that by 2000 video stores would be history.
But in any case the mass media tends to organize itself around faceless demographics which rely on a lowest common denominator type of projected market. This principle underlines everything about mass media from the order in which news stories appear on nightly broadcasts to the range of issues covered in current affairs forums. There has to be a certain number of people, locally, who are interested.
Hence you get stories on ‘current affairs’ journals about various twaddle.
The internet potentially enables one to access a much larger readership/audience. So one can produce much more esoteric material as it doesn’t matter so much if only 0.01% of Australians are interested in articles about, say, late ’50s psychobilly bands. You can reach other fans in Bombay, Singapore, Newark and Manchester – you’re in business.
Likewise the standard coverages of politics usually delivered by partisan associates of major parties like Adams (ALP) and Bolt (Libs) can break down as people may wish to hear more considered and less propogandistic views.
Of course counter to this will be the need of the Rupert Murdochs of the world to control information for their own ends, so we’ll see.
Philip Adams….
All this is quite understandable. Drivers of horse-drawn cabs no doubt said similar things when cars first appeared…
Horse drawn cars, Philip Adams? Mmmm? Yes somewhere this comparison is apt. How to express it? Well a picture’s worth a thousand words innit?
Not exactly fair I’d admit. After all horseshit is good for something.
Adrien;
In respect of Negroponte’s prediction about ‘The Daily Me’, see Tabbloid.
Cheers Jacques. I wouldn’t do it. I’m far too surveillance conscious.
I detest the bias of the NYT but I have to admit that I often end up over there, after all, I can always find some shit to blast when I am short of a topic.
A huge problem in my mind with “The Daily Me” idea is that we will all end up in nice little self-reinforcing mental bubbles, only reading and seeing what we want to read and see. This is potentially a breeding ground for intolerance and ignorance of things outside our direct sphere of interest, not to mention a breakdown in any kind of actual geographically-defined notion of ‘community’. None of those things might be philosophically bad, but they certainly could be practically difficult.
Hell, we already see it with Fox and to a lesser extent MSNBC in the US – news for people who don’t want to hear about things they disagree with.
Of course deciding that there’s a mandatory common news feed for all mankind is not a solution either. I just think we should be cautious about hailing totally cusomised content as a Good Thing.
Paul;
I think that’s what was so good about Missing Link. It didn’t work perfectly but it did try to gather well-written posts without consideration for the author or their inclinations.
Human editorship doesn’t scale very well unfortunately, especially when the editors are all volunteers with demanding dayjobs.
Informed rumour says that Rupert Murdoch’s ongoing commitment to print is due in large part to the influence and preference of his mother, Dame Elizabeth, who turns 100 in February and still holds substantial financial interest in the empire.
“Of course deciding that there’s a mandatory common news feed for all mankind is not a solution either. I just think we should be cautious about hailing totally cusomised content as a Good Thing.”
Paul, yes but I doubt it will happen. I read more widely – opinions and news – than I did when all I had was two papers a day. The net allows us to roam and most people are more likely to do this than accept a personalised feed.
A huge problem in my mind with “The Daily Me” idea is that we will all end up in nice little self-reinforcing mental bubbles, only reading and seeing what we want to read and see. This is potentially a breeding ground for intolerance and ignorance of things outside our direct sphere of interest, not to mention a breakdown in any kind of actual geographically-defined notion of ‘community’. None of those things might be philosophically bad, but they certainly could be practically difficult.
I agree.
Except that’s already happening. Still the Daily me idea would make things worse.
Trouble is our culture has become a contest of different ideological positions. Chris Hitchens had an essay on Historical education where he praised some teacher whose idea was to teach a subject with two text that had conflicting arguments. Teaches the ontology of different perceptions.
People doesn’t think like that in general. They believe one side are ‘the goody guys’ and the others wear black hats and tie teenage girls to traintracks.
But for someone who looks to get quality views from across the spectrum it’s convenient.
Great comment, Adrien.
For ever so long I used to feel ashamed to find myself involuntarily admiring and passionately agreeing with diametrically opposed, well-put arguments, theories, etc.
Now I’m all grown up the shame and inner conflict flowing from this trait are not so noticeable or at all important.
Cheers Posey. ‘Cept for “People doesn’t think like that in general.” What a clunker!
You’re simply exercising your freedom to express a non-mainstream interpretation of grammar, relax.