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By jdb, March 30, 2009

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/20/AR2009032002660.html

Most journalists try to present a ‘left versus right’ debate in the name of objectivity. On the face of it, it looks objective, and it sells papers by creating drama. Nothing makes good copy like a high stakes knock-down fight, does it? The more media resembles a boxing match the more people seem to engage with it. What good is a five minute debate with a bunch of gray area left at the end, or even people agreeing? Nobody wants to watch that , they want conflict! 

You can call that good journalism, and I suppose when covering a poilitical debate, it’s a good thing, but in many cases, it presents an innacurate view of what is actually going on. Presenting a balanced point of view in science is a completely different ballgame. If most data suggests that we are contributing to global warming, and yes, most scientists accept that after objectively weighing the facts, then giving equal time to alternate theories that have been thoroughly skewered is in no way presentiong a ‘balanced’ view, it only does injustice to the more mainstream science that goes on every day.

The Global Warming debate is interesting because it really crystallizes the problem with the whole post-Internet information system we have.  Someone injects information about an issue into the net, either supporting or denying this divisive issue, and it starts to exponentially grow, feeding back on itself – people search and find the information that they are already open to, and they repeat it in blogs and communities. The issue reaches critical mass and professional articles get written, bills get introduced to Congress. Then people get bored and move on to a new body of information to play with. This process serves to keep people distracted and divided from one another.

In the final analysis, global warming believers and deniers have more in common than not, in terms of their day to day concerns and their ethics, their attitudes towards everything but the few divisive issues highlited by activists and politicians. It’s the illusion of separateness, of boundaries that creates the fear of one group overwhelming the other, which in turn creates more boundaries and the desire to ‘beat’ the opposition. A circuit which could do with being disrupted. If an issue doesn’t divide people, does it even get discussed?

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By jdb, March 27, 2009

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/

It’s true, everyone, myself included, is starting to get their news online, and a lot of people link to it in blogs, but it’s not so much piracy that’s a problem here but the fact that it’s really hard to make money from ad revenue on the net. Witness Yahoo, the number one site on the net. Most of it’s money is supposed to be coming from ad revenue and subscriptions to services. It’s just not enough. No ad revenue, no money to pay the tech people, much less pay for content.

I found this post on Slashdot, from a journalist and blogger (yelvington.com).

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl…7&cid=26953803

Which seems fairly level headed.  I’m not sure we can lay the whole thing at the internet’s feet and I just don’t buy in to the predictions of doom, if for no other reason than there are a lot of businesses hurting right now that have nothing to do with media and nothing much to do with the internet for that matter. I’m perfectly willing to believe consolidation and debt incurred from it are just as important factors if not more important. Like the rest of the media business, they spent their large profits from the 80′s and 90′s buying each other out. We’ve already seen the fallout from that in the book business in the 90′s, before the internet really had an effect. And as we’ve seen with banks, these types of mega-companies have a hard time weathering economic storms

Somewhere in the thread someone points out that radio killed extra editions, TV killed evening editions, and now the interent may kill a lot of other papers. But that doesn’t mean they are ‘dying’ any more than TV is.

http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/the_great_seduction/2009/03/american-newspapers-are-history.html

As forthe future, I’d be willing to pay for news, by that I mean good investigative journalism. The expensive kind of journalism. Too many papers (and TV channels as well) merely regurgitate newsfeeds and press releases from the white house, think tanks, and corporations without doing their homework. Instead they substitute cheap talking-head opinion. It’s no wonder people can no longer tell the difference between blogs and news. Integrity is absent from the news, and I bet I’m not the only one that would pay for integrity. Can giant media companies produce integrity? If you ask me, they also have a hard time making decent product. Who wants to pay for cat box liner?

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By jdb, March 25, 2009

Apparently the internet ad market is taking a dive again. The same thing happened the last time the economy tanked, and the question of how to pay for all the stuff on the net has returned.  There is plenty of debate over the reasons, as people in business usually do when they percieve their gravy train coming to an end.  Maybe it’s  just the economy, some flaw in the model, or maybe, if you work on wall street, it’s not really happening at all.

The problem may not be as complex as people think it is. Net advertising works pretty much in the same way as real world advertising – people absorb new information if it’s relevant, or it reinforces a decision they already made and gets them closer to making the deal. But, because the audience isn’t ‘captive’, advertisers won’t pay out as much for impressions (which is why the Googles of the world are obsessed with free content, becuase there’s just not enough money in their model to pay for content.)

There are advantages to offset that major drawback though, such as the ability of free sites to target ads to each user based on information from their searches, messages and social networls, though that only works for some products that tend to do well on the internet anyway like music and books. Ford is still going to want to catch as many of the same viewers as possible for one huge campaign featuring it’s new model in the best possible light. And, on a side note, how much overt invasion of privacy are people willing to experience on a day to day basis? One of the selling points for the web has always been the illusion of anonymity – if that goes, will the internet audience adapt?

So we’re left with the standard, tried and true ad model that we’ve had since the advent of mass media. It might just work out in the long run. As the teens who are watching less TV every year grow up, companies might be willing to pay more for ads. For the time an individual spends surfing or shopping online, he is actually fairly captive, butt in seat, all hyperbole aside, and ads should work on the same principles that newspaper ads do, if not TV ads.

I think TV style ads will most likely stay on TV, as TV and movies are a more ‘family’ activity. Nobody really huddles around the computer with uncle Seth and the kids, and nobody has a party on the weekend to watch ESPN.com. In that respect, the interent as a medium could have a dip in recreational use when people hit the family demographic, just like music does now. So those multimillion dollar ads for family sedans will stay where they are for the foreseeable future.

The internet will get the cheap stuff – the classifieds, the stuff targeted to a locality, the shopping coupons. It will also get it’s share of ads disguised as entertainment, made by ‘media consultants’ who love to give you a virtual handshake. The ‘free’ interent is essentailly a subsistence medium, as we see every time the economy dips. The free sites will have to be full of invasive technologies, obnoxious moving ads, embedded salespeople, and spammers (whether official or not). In order to avoid the curse of the ‘value’ sites, the sites with the quality content and superior user experience might have no choice but to charge for it.

That old bugbear remains – users have historically rejected fee based services – a lot of people got burned very badly with fee based models in the early days of the web. Back then, given the novelty value of the internet, nobody cared if what they were looking at was good or not, true or not, all that stuff just being there for free was enough. And they could always get ‘real’ information from some more reliable source. Maybe now people want that ‘traditional’ reliablity from the world wide web. Only time will tell.