18 August 2005 @ 11:18AM >> Hollywood vs. the old guard of the newspaper industry:

Hollywood is about to deliver bad news to the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times and, to a lesser extent, other big-city dailies around the country. Every major movie studio is rethinking its reliably humongous display ad buys in those papers because those newsosaur readers are, to quote one mogul, “older and elitist” compared to younger, low-brow filmgoers — so it makes no sense to waste the dough.

Wait, it gets worse: I’ve learned that at least two Hollywood movie studios have decided to drastically cut their newspaper display ads as soon as possible.

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“We’re rethinking our newspaper ads and I mean, literally, on every movie. Everybody is,” one movie mogul tells me. “The only people who read newspapers are older and elitist. Movies like Sky High don’t need ads in The New York Times. But the studios did it because newspapers were seen as a necessary evil.

“But I don’t think it’s as important anymore.”

2 August 2005 @ 1:43PM >> Judge Richard Posner has a lengthy, thought-provoking article in The New York Times on the changes brought on by an ever-increasing choice in media consumption.

Among the topics Posner addresses is the adversarial-yet-symbiotic relationship between online citizen-journalists and their professional counterparts in the establishment press:

What really sticks in the craw of conventional journalists is that although individual blogs have no warrant of accuracy, the blogosphere as a whole has a better error-correction machinery than the conventional media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of information are pooled and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust. Not only are there millions of blogs, and thousands of bloggers who specialize, but, what is more, readers post comments that augment the blogs, and the information in those comments, as in the blogs themselves, zips around blogland at the speed of electronic transmission.

This means that corrections in blogs are also disseminated virtually instantaneously, whereas when a member of the mainstream media catches a mistake, it may take weeks to communicate a retraction to the public. This is true not only of newspaper retractions - usually printed inconspicuously and in any event rarely read, because readers have forgotten the article being corrected - but also of network television news. It took CBS so long to acknowledge Dan Rather’s mistake because there are so many people involved in the production and supervision of a program like ‘’60 Minutes II'’ who have to be consulted.

The charge by mainstream journalists that blogging lacks checks and balances is obtuse. The blogosphere has more checks and balances than the conventional media; only they are different. The model is Friedrich Hayek’s classic analysis of how the economic market pools enormous quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized character, its lack of a master coordinator or regulator, and the very limited knowledge possessed by each of its participants.

In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise - not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs. It’s as if The Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters, many of them experts, all working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no advertising.

How can the conventional news media hope to compete? Especially when the competition is not entirely fair. The bloggers are parasitical on the conventional media. They copy the news and opinion generated by the conventional media, often at considerable expense, without picking up any of the tab. The degree of parasitism is striking in the case of those blogs that provide their readers with links to newspaper articles. The links enable the audience to read the articles without buying the newspaper. The legitimate gripe of the conventional media is not that bloggers undermine the overall accuracy of news reporting, but that they are free riders who may in the long run undermine the ability of the conventional media to finance the very reporting on which bloggers depend.

This is an interesting point, but I think Posner is conflating two separate issues. Bloggers are undoubtedly dependent on the establishment press. A significant portion of what bloggers comment on happens to be the end-product of the news industry, and that end-product would not exist without the news-gathering apparatus of the establishment press.

However, bloggers are not any more “free riders” than people who write letters to the editor. The only difference is, if I write a letter to the editor of The New York Times, the odds are very small that it would be run, and if it is, I’d be lucky to get more than a hundred words printed. But with a website such as this, I effectively bypass the gatekeeper who decides what to print, and I can find an audience for my thoughts.

Posner’s real issue isn’t with bloggers, but with the current business model of the print media. It wasn’t hordes of drooling bloggers that forced The New York Times to publish their articles online for free; they—as did most of the establishment media—decided to do so voluntarily, long before there were such things as blogs. Inherent in putting up a web page is the ability for other people to link to it. That’s what blogs do; they link to other sources, many of which run ads on their pages.

So if I send a reader from this site to The New York Times, I am not diminishing the financial position of the Times unless they’ve structured their business in such a way to take a loss from web-based readers. But considering the prevalence of ads on the Times website, they are likely benefitting—not hurting—by my sending readers their way. Either way, it is not incumbent upon bloggers to devise a working business model for the establishment press. We bloggers haven’t even found a reliable business model in which we can make money, and I don’t see anyone in the old media shedding tears over that.

In the long-run, I think blogs help the establishment press by (1) forcing them to have a better product, and (2) putting more people in contact with that product. Whether people like or dislike what’s produced by the media is not determined by blogs. But blogs are great at shoving potential customers through the doors of sites like The New York Times, CNN.com, etc. If those potential customers feel like they’re being played for fools once they’re inside the gates of Big Media, that’s out of our control.

31 May 2005 @ 10:54AM >> For the first time in history, a cell-phone ring tone tops a major music singles chart. I have no idea what to make of this, but that won’t stop me from declaring it some sort of significant cultural shift.

Prediction: The near future will be littered with scores of low-fidelity re-renderings of yesterday’s icons.

11 March 2005 @ 9:13AM >> More evidence of the establishment media’s continued decline:

The Prudential Equity Group issued a biting 72-page report this morning on the state of circulation and found that both quality and quantity continue to decline.

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“Decline in both quality and quantity of circulation at several key newspapers owned by the New York Times Co. and Tribune, points to the potential for further pricing pressure from advertisers in future quarters,” the report observed.

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Prudential said it compiled the report at this time because of the industry’s “very difficult year” in circulation and because circulation “is a key metric in setting advertising rates.”

Glenn Reynolds cites the report above, and notices something odd:

I cancelled my newspaper subscription — not out of pique, as is probably the case with many LAT subscribers, but because we weren’t reading it any more, and copies just piled up. They sent a guy to my house to offer me a free subscription. I said no, but last week they just started delivering copies again anyway. I thought it was just a mistake by our carrier, but now I wonder if it wasn’t a circulation-boosting strategy . . . .

22 December 2004 @ 2:57PM >> Industry publication Editor & Publisher cites a Gallup poll showing the Internet to be the only news delivery medium that’s grown in use over the past two years:

[E]very source has fallen somewhat since 2002, with only news on the Internet gaining, from 15% going there every day two years ago to 20% doing so today.

Some sources dropped heavily: National newspapers are off 4%, from 11% to 7%; NPR is off 5%; local TV news is down 6%; network news down 7%; and PBS news plunged 8%. In that company, local newspapers are doing fairly well, only dropping 3%. Cable news dropped 2%.

Some may attribute this to the public’s rejection of the perceived bias of the traditional media. Others will say that it is a predictable effect of the continued penetration of the Internet. One thing’s for sure: people have only so much time in the day, so as one medium boosts its audience, it will naturally come at the expense of other media. The question is, will the traditional media grudgingly accept this New (Media) World Order, or will they fight for their audience by revamping their product?

21 May 2003 >> The success of Apple’s new online music venture shows that people are willing to pay for things that they could otherwise steal. The trick is relaxing the restrictions that competing systems have imposed on paying customers. Will the music industry take note and completely abandon intrusive “digital right management” schemes? Let’s hope so. If they need any more convincing, they should heed the lesson learned repeatedly by the software industry: pissing off paying customers isn’t good for business. More >>

3 June 2002 >> “How would you feel if you went to your local music store, bought a tape of your favorite band’s latest release, and discovered that playing it in your car damaged the stereo so severely that your entire car needed to be brought in for servicing? Or what if the tape you just bought were incompatible with your walkman, so you couldn’t listen to it at the gym or while jogging? What would you think if you found out that the music industry intentionally manufactured tapes so that their customers would suffer this damage and inconvenience?” More >>