Save the whale!

We simply had too little time this morning to unpack or even fully introduce The Long Tail this morning. I will try here to follow up on just one of the key threads this morning and on a lingering question on at least one of the discussion evaluation sheets: What are the implications of a long tail economy on or for the news biz?

I have good news and bad news. Let’s begin with the good news.A diminishing value on “cultural buckets,” as Anderson refers to the hits and the hit makers, means an end to monopolies. This is good for entrepreneurs, for single-voice publishers, for new news organizations just starting out. The era of “one size fits all” is over because the scarcity model (analog) has given way to the abundance model (digital). Consumers (and readers/viewers/interactors) are networked, and this network is choosing more non-hits than hits.

The bad news: Competing on the tail means facing a dizzying, daunting number of competitors. Because of printing, paper, ink and distribution costs, the print news industry is  a “hit”-driven business — it has to be. Remove those costs, which could also be seen as barriers to entry into the marketplace, and you get what we’ve seen online – everyone and his or her mother publishing online (the giant 90% crap model I drew on the whiteboard).

So we end up competing not only against the New York Times, CNN.com and the Rome News-Tribune, hypothetically here, but also with each and every blogger on any one of the topics we’re reporting on, on all the topics we’re reporting on. Imagine the long tail of competition re-configuring for each and every story or multimedia package we publish online, as we compete within a new niche each and every time we publish.

Print is dead, or at least it’s dying. When, therefore, should a print newspaper, facing the worst fiscal year for the industry since the depression,  consider moving all of its assets online? The question is how to replace enough of the revenue streams that have long-supported print fast enough to continue to fund news and editorial operations, and do it while facing new competition on every front. The AJC, to cite just one of hundreds of potential examples, appears to be losing this battle.

Not all newspapers need wholly migrate to online, but many will have to in order to survive. And online needs these newsgathering, original reporting enterprises. A study in 2007 determined that more than 95% of blog content is derivative, leaving less than 5% that includes or delivers original reporting.

I’ve described this ecosystem before as a whale, with the whale metaphorically representing good, old-fashioned, boots-on-the-streets reporting and newsgathering. An entire ecosystem of dependent organisms (advertisers, reporters, editors, ad reps, newspaper delivery people, printing plants, even bloggers) feeds off this whale. The 95% of commentary, media criticism and observations based on original journalism is part of this dependent ecosystem.

The whale is ill, perhaps critically so. It needs to adapt to its new digital ocean. The questions: Can the analog, hit-driven whale evolve fast enough to stay alive, to become digital and keep this whole ecosystem alive? Can it grow a long tail? I await your responses as you look to the long tail for an answer to last week’s question, how to save journalism.

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” — Thomas Jefferson

The future of the news

As news organizations face declining advertising revenues and rising costs, as they reduce the numbers of boots on the ground, of reporters out there gathering the news and watchdogging government, as government grows, we as a democracy face a difficult question: Who’s going to pay for quality journalism? How?

Missing in the Internet age, as empowering as it is for individual voices, is a sustainable online-only revenue model that can pay for the expensive enterprise of reporting, of good journalism that operates on the principle of verification. This is where you come in. I want your ideas, your thoughts, your perspectives on how to save journalism in an era of free digital content. We (the general public) don’t want to have to pay for anything, including copyrighted content, including full-length movies. But content isn’t free, or at least it isn’t produced without cost.

I will first present some models, including two you read about and heard of this week, but then I want to get your proposals. Help save journalism!

• Isaacson’s micropayment model that was discussed on The Daily Show, which would operate something like 99-cent songs on iTunes
• A nonprofit model, like NPR or the St. Petersburg Times newspaper, perhaps even government-subsidized
• DisneyWorld theme park model: An interactor pays a super-aggregator, like Google or TimeWarner, for a pass to ride all the rides, read all the content, for some determined period of time. Berry’s online databases are on this model.
• Start from scratch: Build up an online-only news organization absent the costs of print production and distribution or studios and broadcast equipment. Examples: New West, Politico.com, TalkingPointsMemo and VoiceofSanDiego.org.
• Branded, personality-driven stables of writers, like the HuffingtonPost.com, which draw visitors/interactors
• Your ideas HERE: So let’s apply the wisdom of the crowds here and generate some new ideas. Build off of each other’s ideas. By midnight Sunday.

Storytelling with a purpose

Thank you, Dustin, for another excellent discussion. I couldn’t be happier with our Friday morning sessions so far. They have been rich, and I noted that each and everyone participated this morning. That’s a good discussion.

I would like to build on our froth of engagement by bringing up a few things we simply didn’t have time for this morning, in particular what journalistic storytelling is and for what it should strive.

Kovach and Rosenstiel write on page 188 of The Elements of Journalism, paraphrasing Roy Peter Clark and Chip Scanlan of the Poynter Institute, that “effective newswriting can be found at the intersection of civic clarity, the information citizens need to function, and literary grace, which is the reporter’s storytelling skill set.”

I want to explore this skill set, begin unpacking it, because it is precisely this skill set with which the course endeavors to equip you.

First, what is journalism? In this course, as in many if not most instances, it is storytelling with a purpose. What’s the purpose? “To provide people with information they need to understand the world,” Kovach and Rosenstiel write (page 189). First we have to find the information, then we seek to make it meaningful, relevant and engaging. This is our task with the AIDS Resource Council. We will gather information, then we will make connections, reveal how relevant this information and cause are, and engage site visitors with the plight of AIDs survivors, showing them how they can get involved.

To that end, I point us to the advice on the book’s page 197, that “better storytelling doesn’t begin after you sit down to edit a story on video, write a script, or pull up to an empty screen to write a narrative story. It begins before you ever go out to report. And it involves reporting differently, going to different sources and asking different questions.”

The book suggests a few questions to guide this story-planning process:

• What’s this story really about?
• Who is the audience for this story and what information do these people need to know to make up their own minds about the subject?
• Who has the information?
• What’s the best way to tell this story?

How do we tell our story? Again, Rosenstiel and Kovach have us covered (page 199):

• A profile
• Explanatory piece
• Issues and trend stories
• Investigative
• Narrative
• Descriptive day in the life
• Voices or perspective story
• Visual story

Which of these make the most sense for us working with ARC? Specifically, we have these events coming up:

On Feb. 12 here at Berry, HIV testing will be offered free to anyone at Berry. This will be done 10am-2pm in the Ladd Center. We’re welcome to be there and to interview, photograph, etc., but we need to be sure to ask each and every individual’s permission before proceeding. I will put a consent form together. How are we going to tell this story? Brainstorm.

On March 3, another HIV testing event, from 9am to 1pm.

On March 7, the Latino community is having a health fair in West Rome. This opportunity is golden – two marginalized communities, Latinos and AIDs survivors. Hundreds came to this event in October 2007. How are we going to tell this story?

Finally, on March 10, Women and Girls HIV/AIDs Awareness Day, with free testing and some other events. More on this later.

ARC also delivers and otherwise provides food/groceries on Wednesdays. How do we tell this story, which is part of a larger story about the services ARC provides?

So, for each of these pieces of our overall, what is the story, and how do we tell specifically that story? Which medium or media should we use? I await your brainstorms.

BTW, Sanna’s Swedish for “Lies, damned lies and statistics”:
Löngn, törbannad löngn och stateshic.

And, finally, a pointer to Jon Stewart on CNN’s now-defunct Crossfire making many of the same points you all so aptly made this morning in discussion.

Maximizing truth and minimizing harm

I commend our discussion leaders this morning. I didn’t give Lindsay and Minyoung enough time. I’ll figure out how to make quizzes shorter. And not everyone liked being called on, but I measure a discussion’s success in part by how many voices were heard. By that measure, we had a good morning.

Finally, you see that I am physiologically incapable of shutting up. I try really, really hard. I’ll try harder. A big “thank you” to Lindsay and to Minyoung for being our pioneers, our trailblazers. The first discussion is the hardest one to lead.

So, to extend and expand our discussion here in the limitless online environment, I’d like to pose a few more brain ticklers to which time did not permit attention (our fearless leaders had three pages of questions).

First, I’d like to return us to Minyoung’s chart of how inter-related, interconnected Korea’s media and political networks are. We in the United States face a similar challenge, that of media consolidation. To Minyoung’s chart I’d like to add this one from Columbia Journalism Review (select a media company, like News Corp., and see the mind-numbing list of properties; it explains much in the area of product placement and cross-promotions).

My question: What in your opinion are the greatest threats to American journalism’s obligation to the truth and to fierce independence? What, in other words, are the corrosive influences upsetting or polluting our collective pursuit of truth, of meaning, of sense?

Another follow-up I’d like your thoughts on concerns how journalism sometimes fails in its attempt to report or provide the truth. This was an interesting question from this morning. What, in other words, are the more common ways a fuller account of the truth (or a truth, or some truths) is prevented? Some options here include bias in the news, a failure to provide a complete account (insufficiency), and allowing one voice or one side or perspective to color or even dominate the account (the first callback often shapes the rest of the story; it’s human nature). What do you think?

And the natural follow-up to the follow-up: What can we do as digital storytellers to avoid these sand traps and stay in the fairway?

Finally, our “list,” the centerpiece of our discussion. Kovach and Rosenstiel encourage us to:

1. Never add anything that was not there.
2. Never deceive the audience (or the people formerly known as the audience; as one blogger famously put it, speaking to journos: “We [bloggers] will fact-check your ass!).
3. Be as transparent as possible about your methods and motives.
4. Rely on your own original reporting.
5. Exercise humility (this will protect us against assumption)

We added:

• Maximize truth and minimize harm.
• Act (fiercely) independently. (Briona)
• Do your own work. (Michael Oreskes, The New York Times)

What is missing from this very fine list?

DEADLINE: 6 p.m. Sunday (SuperBowl 43 kickoff!)

What is visual culture?

For my students in Visual Rhetoric, I want us to crowdsource a definition of “visual culture.” To do this, we first must come up with some notions about culture. What is culture?

Here are the groundrules: I want at least one comment from each person in the class, and this comment cannot merely agree with those that preceded it. Of course all are invited to comment more than once, reacting to other students’ definitions.

Secondly, no Googling or outside sourcing of any kind. For this to work, these definitions, like culture itself, should come only from us, out of our heads.

The deadline: Friday morning, 10 a.m., so that I have time before class to read them and draw some conclusions.

The future of print journalism

The Christmas break provided me with a rare and special reading-fest. I plowed through 15 books, including Daniel Stashower’s The Beautiful Cigar Girl, a non-fictional account of a murder in New York City in 1841 that was popularized by Edgar Allan Poe. The murder of a beautiful cigar girl gave the city’s penny presses a carnival of twists and turns, suspects, clues and police mistakes.

Called the father of the penny press, James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, claimed his newspaper would “outstrip everything in the conception of man. . . What is to prevent a daily newspaper from being made the greatest organ of social life? Books have had their day. The theaters have had their day. The temple of religion has had its day. A newspaper can be made to take the lead of all of these in the great movement of human thought.”

So what’s next in leading “the great movement of human thought?”
Books, theater, religion and newspapers all have at least one thing in common: A lack of interaction/feedback, at least on a grand scale, by and from from their readers/viewers/adherents, who are largely passive. They read, watch, listen, and believe.

The Internet, citizen journalism, and blogging each have the potential to fill these participatory voids, allowing for more active participation. These new “interactors” can (and do!) provide content, rather than just take what they’re given. This means very new and evolving roles for newspapers.

Print-based news media will survive, but will they occupy more than a niche? I don’t think so, though it will be a large niche, and eventually a profitable one. Like magazines, it will be a mostly Long Tail economy in which publishers tailor increasingly specific content for their increasingly specific audiences (narrowcasting). The giant newspaper presses and man-killing rolls of newsprint are fast becoming as quaint as steam engines and whale oil.

A student in my Writing for Digital Media course offered this analogy: The power grid. “I see news gathering becoming less centralized, as in so many facets of our society. Electric utilities now talk about a ‘distributed’ generation, which means solar PV modules on individual rooftops, all feeding the grid. The gazillion bloggers already out there and the growing use of personal electronics that turn everybody into a reporter, which we witnessed again in Mumbai, shows a parallel trend in journalism.” I think Bruce is right on.

Professionals likely will continue to serve as this journalistic grid’s caretakers and overseers, the conduit through which news flows from a universe of sources. Many readers will demand  reasonably good prose, thorough reporting and vetting that trained and experienced writers and editors provide. Of course, many will not.

The power grid analogy recognizes that technology has enabled anyone to commit random acts of journalism. But filters will still be needed. Someone will have to organize and oversee the grid. Without them, the information ecosystem would — to mix my metaphors — quickly resemble the Caddyshack pool on “Caddies Day.” (An early example of product placement, by the way.)

“Doodie! Doodie!”

What is culture? (redux)

At the beginning of the semester, we in COM 300 crowdsourced a definition of “culture,” or operationalized for our discussions in class. We also tried defining “visual culture.” Here’s the blog entry on those discussions.

Now, at the end of the semester, after a great deal of discussion about the different rhetorics of various media, including advertising, photography, cinema, and television, I’d like us to give those two definitions or concepts another go, building on what we came up with back in August.

So, by Wednesday, Dec. 3, please comment to this post. Feel free to refer back to the previous post. Make note of any changes in your conceptions now as opposed to those back in August.

Photography is like . . .

To continue and extend our conversation (and to make sure I get to hear from everyone in COM 300), this blog entry asks you to finish the sentence in the headline, with elaboration and explanation. I’ll go first, to get us thinking and to model the kinds of thoughts and posts I’m looking for.

As I mentioned in class, to me photography is like poetry. I love poetry; I love playing with words, and poetry is wordplay if it is nothing else. When writing students expressed to the Walt Whitman that they wanted to become poets because they “have so much to say,” Whitman wasn’t interested. When writing students said they wanted to become poets because they “love playing with language, with words,” Whitman suddenly became interested in teaching them.

Similarly, photography is imageplay. Both poetry and photography “intensively see,” as Susan Sontag put it in her seminal work, On Photography. Much of poetry is concerned with the visual, getting us to “see” a flower, a tree, pain, loss, love, the wrinkles in a woman’s face, and to see these otherwise ordinary artifacts as we have never seen them before. To truly see. Seeing is believing? No, believing is seeing.

• David’s photograph of a degraded, wrinkled, old pumpkin? A poem about aging and decomposition, and an eloquent poem at that.
• A water buffalo with a degenerate eye (vision, seeing, window to the soul)? Ah, a poem about the suffering and hopelessness in Zimbabwe, perhaps?
• A stuffed freezer with hyper-packaged, processed American foods a poem about the excesses of American culture, in contrast with need in most of the rest of the world?

Think about how photography turns living beings — like a water buffalo or a pumpkin — into a thing, a thing to look at. (Is the photo a record of that water buffalo or leaf, or a record of how the photographer saw that water buffalo or leaf?) And how photography turns things into living beings — again, David’s dying pumpkin-become-old woman, or the leaf with veins running through it. (Sontag talks about this photographic strategy on page 111, where she discusses photography’s ability to disclose “the thingness of human beings, the humanness of things.”)

Think of how many poems dignify the mundane — a flower, a tree, an acorn, a sunset, a pretty girl, a rainy day. By calling attention to it, and describing it in such detail, the poem dignifies that object and makes a virtue of it. The mundane becomes — if for only the contemplated moment — something beautiful. This is true also in photography.

Can you think a poem that is “ugly”? A bad poem, sure, just like bad photography, but a poem or photo of something universally ugly? Nope. Photography, like poetry, beautifies, dignifies, exalts, celebrates . . . even the ugly and the mundane.

The poem cannot explain that object, but it can acknowledge it. Photography does precisely the same thing. Chad’s photo of the WTC towers cannot explain the devastation of 9-1-1, but it can and does acknowledge it. Jennifer’s photo of the deck and dock behind her grandmother’s house cannot explain the meaning of that place, but it can acknowledge it (and all of its sun-splashed beauty). Again, as Sontag puts it, “photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire” (p. 4).

Ah, this is another possible answer: Photography is like beauty. Fleeting. Subjective. To quote Aquinas, beauty is “wholeness, harmony, radiance.” To quote James Joyce on Aquinas, “wholeness” is apprehending the object as separate from all else — as in apprehending a pair of shoes as separate from all else (editing, choosing, isolating). “Radiance” is the “whatness” of the object, the essence of that object that makes it distinctly what it is and nothing else — like the pumpkin-ness of the “ugly” pumpkins we viewed, or the “water buffalo-ness” of the water buffalo.

Oh, this is fun. And I could write like this all day long. But now it’s your turn. Photography is like . . . what?

Church-State: In search of a better metaphor

In Freedom of Expression, we have been discussing, among many other things, the usefulness of the “wall of separation” metaphor first coined by Jefferson and cemented in American jurisprudence by Hugo Black in Everson v. Board of Education. The metaphor has been used describe the proper relationship between church and state, and the appropriate administration of the Establishment Clause.

The First Amendment is widely interpreted to contain both a free exercise clause, giving Americans a constitutional right to religious expression and practice, and an establishment clause, prohibiting government from establishing, endorsing or unfairly burdening or aiding any one religion over others. As we have been wrestling with it, this tension between “no aid” and “no hindrance” is highly problematic. The results often produce some odd compromises, like the Allegheny County v. ACLU plan of rotating displays at Christmas.

My question for the class in this post: Is the wall, or Black’s “high wall”, the best metaphor? Is it even an appropriate metaphor? Or has it actually been detrimental, leading us down false roads of inquiry and public policy? Have the limitations implicit in the metaphor, realizing all metaphors to be inherently limited, actually hurt constitutional law? If you agree that the wall metaphor is deficient, can you think of a better one? One that leads us down better, or at least less destructive, roads of discourse and public policy?

James Madison, for example, proposed instead a line, one that undulates and changes, accommodating various levels of cooperation and collaboration depending on the circumstances.

I proposed in class the metaphor of a shoreline, a metaphor that recognizes that you cannot hold back the sea, that there will be a co-mingling of land and sea — we call it the beach, or shore — and one that acknowledges varying levels of interaction. Think of an inlet, a set of circumstances, such as school vouchers, in which the government allows religious expression and exercise alongside secular expression. The water is allowed to pool, but it is contained.

Taylor Damron added to this metaphor the notion of silt, or those areas such as public monument parks in which there is liberal mixing of the secular and the religious. Think Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, the case we just litigated.

The premise for me in the shoreline analogy is that the question is not whether government should be permitted to affect religion or vice versa. The question is how, and a metaphor of a wall diverts us from wrestling with the First-enfranchised right of religious freedom and with the difficulties of finding, determining, negotiating the terms of cooperation (intermingling). I, therefore, am an accommodationist. The separationists among us will disagree with me, and that’s cool (how boring class would be if we all agreed on everything!).

I await your answers. (Let me hear from you by midnight Sunday.)

We might be talking about democracy

What an interesting and in some ways disturbing discussion of product placement and, more importantly, the inversion of culture by and for commercial purposes. In no particular order, I want to respond to some of the comments.

First, a few endorsed product placement as better than other forms of advertising, such as email spam or circulars stuffing your mailboxes. I agree, but the endorsement supposes an “either or” choice, that by choosing product placement we somehow diminish the effects of the other forms. This, of course, is not true. We will continue to get lots of spam. Our mailboxes will continue to be filled with tree-killing trash. So it’s not a matter of choosing where the ads are going to come from; it’s a creep or march of commercial messages into all areas of our lives.

Several mentioned that product placement isn’t a problem because had we not done this exercise, we likely wouldn’t have even noticed the placements. To me, this sentiment underlines precisely why it is a huge and growing problem. To the extent we don’t notice commercial messages embedded in our culture, in our reading and viewing, we have stopped thinking critically about our world and about the many messages clamoring for our attention. Caitie mentions this when she lamented “people losing the ability to critically analyze the world around them,” which means that perhaps we are “willing to let advertisers . . . inundate us without putting up any sort of fight.” I see little fight in what should be a group that I would expect to be among the most discerning of media watchers — COM majors. Finally, Caitie warns that we risk being indoctrinated, and I fear she is right.

Fears of indoctrination lead to another problem I see in our reactions to the commerce/culture melt, which is sympathy for advertisers and movie makers. Several of us are willing to abide the messages because they “help pay for the movie.” There are lots of ways to pay for a movie. Product placement revenues do not necessarily go toward paying directors, actors, key grips and camera operators. They do go into the coffers of the distributors, who are interested only in profit. Directors, writers, actors — often these individuals are simply creating and expressing. A few of us did see the dangers in limiting this creative process with purely commercial motives (Kate S. and Katie O., for example).

Another common sentiment was that seeing a product makes us feel better about buying and using the product ourselves. Starbucks was the example used. Seeing it in a movie, like You’ve Got Mail, makes us feel better about buying coffee there ourselves. Remember what You’ve Got Mail was about? A soul-less book chain driving out a Mom-and-Pop corner bookstore! I don’t know that we should feel better about giving another soul-less chain our coin when it is driving out smaller, better, more responsible coffee houses more intimately tied to the local economy. My opinion.

And let’s make sure we know what we’re saying here when we say no problem to being bombarded by and with brands. If you see a row of khaki pants, for example, a pair each from Gap, Dockers, Ralph Lauren, Fubu and Duckhead, how are these pairs of pants different? Other than the little logo patch? Style, design, workmanship — all of this is nearly the same. Heck, some of them came out of the VERY SAME FACTORY. These brands don’t make anything. Realize that. They manufacture only an image. Outsourcing and third parties make their stuff. And who is paying for the very expensive image production, the advertising, the product placement? We are. Those costs are passed right along to you and to me.

So a big part of what’s going on is a lie, a deception, a romance that we apparently are all too willing to uncritically accept. In short, to quote Leigh Jackson, “maybe it is a problem that we are so numb to advertisements.” I think it’s a huge problem, and I had no idea how huge until I read these comments. This is not to condemn anyone, not at all. This is a college. We’re in this class together to learn. So this is all written to encourage us to question our answers.

A few more thoughts.

I appreciated Nayu’s concern for our children. If the blur is this dramatic now, what will our children face? If we have this much trouble critically examining cultural and commercial artifacts parading into our lives, what hope do our children have of understanding when they’re being pitched as opposed to merely entertained?

I also appreciated Brittany’s caution that when news and information sources flirt with product placement, they do so at the risk of their own credibility. So there are lines in the sand, it would seem. We just aren’t sure where they are or why.

Finally, I liked Christina’s warning that the commercial impulse might also be a superficial one, that to the extent a piece of culture is commercial, it can only be to that same degree superficial. I think she’s right. And we should think long and hard about this, as well. If a movie is selling, it’s not doing much else. Or, more accurately, when it is selling, it can’t do much of anything else, like inform, inspire, re-imagine.

We might, then, be even talking about democracy itself. Commercial messages have the potential to turn consumption into a substitute for democracy. By thinking, “Hey, I can choose what to buy, what to eat, what to watch, I’m free! This is democracy!” No, it’s not. It’s capitalism. Having significant and varied political choices, a say in how we are governed, a look at how government is going about its business, at how it’s spending my money — that’s democracy. Commerce and capitalism potentially mask or divert us from all that is undemocratic in society, like the incredibly unfair taxation and wealth distribution systems in this country. Do not fall into the trap of replacing “citizens” with “consumers.”

To underline my point, think about how much we learn from and about our political candidates from their advertising and from entirely staged, produced, manufactured, managed events? Nearly all of it. There is almost nothing authentic or spontaneous; it is all visual and symbolic. So the advertising ethic has become the dominant method of communicating even political messages. Wow.

So I beg you to re-think these questions. I beg you to shake off the anti-biotic-like resistance to the corrosive power of commercial messages. To wonder how much of creative expression fulfills or has a commercial goal, and to wonder if perhaps it is too much.

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