Funding Rupert's retirement package vs finding a new way to share information

I read Richard Glover's Saturday column in the Sydney Morning Herald, headed 'Rupert's on the money', on actual newsprint. Yes, real paper! Well I started to, anyway. I didn't finish it (or the whole paper - I rarely do these days) as I had better things to get on with, like breathing, eating, sleeping and whatever. But I looked it up again online, because I spend more time online than with my head in a newspaper (yes, it was different way back when, pre-Web...) and the subject - pay-for-view - does interest me.

I can understand Richard's thinking, suggesting as he does that we are willing to pay through the nose for convenience food yet baulk at paying relatively small sums for information online. He asks 'why is it so?' and goes further to suggest that it shouldn't be like that at all, that information has a value and that by rights it should be distributed for a fee, not freely. After all, no-one stands around on street corners handing out free coffee and sandwiches, do they? Now on the surface that sounds plausible in our consumer society, where very little is absolutely "free" and where goods and services are traded in markets and in theory find fair prices. Note that, "fair" prices, where supply and demand meet and share out resources. Nice theory.

In that way Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is certainly free to offer its journalistic services for a price, and good luck to them with that. It may work, they may find the sweet spot in their pricing that covers costs, and more. But unless the vast majority of old media close ranks on this - as well they may - "free" content just a click or two away will draw the punters and their dollars. But if they do close ranks they will be running a risk - the risk of being labelled a cartel. Not that name-calling - or even legal action - has ever scared these guys off. So they may get away with it, and lock their "information" behind a wall. Of course the wall will leak like a sieve, but it will provide some revenue relief for the old guard of the media -at least for a while. Fair use and foul will mean that good (or perhaps 'desired'?) content gets quoted and blogged outside of the walled garden, so nothing short of a totalitarian lock-down would save old media from slowly leaching to death. So why fight so hard, belittling the upstarts? Why not put the effort instead into finding a new business model, one that works sustainably?

Philosophically I have to say that information - be it the daily news, data or reference material - should be free. Freedom of information is something that we cherish as a right, something enlightened and empowering. So stashing it away behind a paywall is fraught with danger, in that it's inequitable in its distribution, it limits the sum growth of our human knowledge and technology and is a simple power play. It could be seen as a blatant misuse of the "information" in the first place. When we invented the wheel, did we share it or sell it? When we copied the wheel from nature, did we pay nature back for the intellectual property? I would guess not.

Nice though that philosophy is, it's not going to work. Most of us live in a society where our lives - our means - depend upon income derived from achieving a fair price for our goods or services. So we are left with Rupert, Richard and their cohorts hoping to create something, anything, in a digital age that they can swap for cash. The problem is that they keep coming up with poor analogies for their plight - like Richard's example of exorbitant sandwich and coffee shop prices - to illustrate that what they do - to gather, filter, qualify, refashion and regurgitate (in varying degrees of "quality") information - is just as worthy of payment as that coffee that may cost $5 but gives you a break from your work, gets you out of your chair and lifts you for an hour or two. But Richard himself answers that when he eschews the $5 coffee, makes and takes to work his own sandwiches and avoids most of what he sees as underwhelming and overpriced. So to use Richard's own analogy, how should we avoid these old guard media barons and their underwhelming, over-priced content, if not by blogging or fashioning our own?

Let's face it - we have stepped into a virtual, digital world and the old model of printing on paper, trucking it around and burning up finite resources just doesn't work like it used to... and it will only get worse. Subsidising "quality content" with the classifieds cash cow is all but over. And walling up your online content - be it your news, your images, or your music - may stem the tide, but by clinging to old ways - the "physical model" of distribution and ownership - you are just delaying the inevitable. The internet has created a new paradigm, where we are able to freely disintermediate, removing any middle layers that may distribute but don't effectively value-add, putting information ownership and publishing back where it started - with the people. If old media don't adapt quickly enough to that online opportunity, by truly adding value and leveraging their strengths, then they will be overwhelmed by change. They may retreat into their walled cities but they will waste away.

In fairness, you can check Richard's piece out too, just here: http://sn.im/rhjtg

Posted via email from gtveloce's posterous

On the subject of "professional" media - MJ and the Goldblum "death"

On the subject of "professional" media - that part of the infomercial noise spectrum that portrays itself as of a higher quality, maintaining standards that mere bloggers could not sustain or even hope for, here is a pertinent quote:

The need of the professional media to be first with the news -- many did for a short time report the Goldblum rumor as fact -- adds further veracity. And, of course, the whole process is speeded up by the Web.

So we have a feedback loop, by which the people who say 'trust us' report a mistruth, which tends to reinforce belief and trust in the mistruth. Which is also to say that by 'professional' we mean 'prostituted and corrupted' by the need to feed their clientele, quickly. Of course everyone makes mistakes, once in a while.

Why just blame 200kmh+ "hoons" for speeding? #cars #language #society

The old-world media love to beat this stuff up:

Last year three of the highest speeds recorded on Queensland roads occurred on the M1, including two at Stapylton of 243km/h and 237km/h and one at Helensvale, of 235km/h.

Let me guess, they were probably young males in one of (a) turbocharged grey market Nissan Skylines; (b) another brand of after-market hotted up Japanese car or (c) high-end US-style V8 sedans (what some of us imagine to be "Aussie" cars, simply because we build or assemble some part of them here). But they could just have easily have been white-shoed cardigan wearers in their Maseratis, Ferraris or Astons. Except they aren't as news-worthy, unless of course they are a "celebrity" or a politician responsible for road safety.

Of course it goes without saying that the police are "exasperated". And naturally it's downplayed as just lucky that there have been "no fatal crashes on the motorway so far this year.

We can all draw the pictures in our minds, of these criminally insane law-breakers tearing around at stupidly excessive speed, but truth be told every motorist exceeds the posted speed limit at some point in their driving lives. Perhaps not by these speeds, but certainly by non-trivial amounts. Perhaps you choose to do it, I don't know. But whereas here in this article we are looking at just 3 incidences of clearly deliberate and excessive speeding on one motorway, the majority of otherwise law-abiding "speeders" are equally deliberately going 10, 20 or 30 kilometres an hour over the limit, usually on potholed suburban streets littered with intersections, driveways, cyclists and pedestrians to boot. Now whilst we can easily say that "if they crash (at these extreme speeds), they'll likely die - police" we can also quite justifiably say that far more people are taking equally life-threatening risks on a daily basis. Sometimes they do it deliberately, sometimes by carelessness or ignorance. But tell me, why focus on the extreme "hoons" when the greater risk is all around us?

Why indeed do we make, sell or modify road-registerable cars that can easily double the speed limit? And why do we spend so much money replacing narrow, curvy roads with straighter, safer and faster multi-lane motorways? If we seriously wanted to reduce speeding we'd govern cars and restrict traffic flow (ok, we do that now - they are called traffic jams). Fact is, humans like to get places faster, not slower, and they enjoy some degree of personal risk-taking; indeed some of our community simply enjoy living closer to the edge.

None of which is particularly helpful in reducing death or injury on our roads, or saving us from our wasteful, unsustainable selves. But it does give us something to read in the press.

ABC, SBS vanish in "Tectonic shift" in Aussie TV #language #media

Let me unravel the meaning behind the Sydney Daily Telegraph's statement today that "Network Ten’s launch of the digital-only free-to-air sports channel One is a tectonic shift in Australian television". This  is taking a geological term (the agonisingly slow, grinding movement of huge plates that comprise the Earth's crust) and applying it (very accurately) to the agonisingly slow, grinding progress that represents "change" in the Australian TV broadcasting industry.

It's a bit like a "quantum leap", which is of course a very, very small - almost undetectable - change in state (and one that will not exist if observed). But good on Channel 10 - or perhaps One - for making a move that the public broadcasters made a few years ago. Not that the public broadcasters matter - for as the Tele explained, "After years of an industry comprising just the Seven, Nine and Ten channels, since last Thursday night we now have a fourth – One." Hmmm. What's missing there? ABC 1 and 2, and SBS 1 and 2 perhaps? At least they are in good company - apparently "pay TV" is also not part of the "industry". 

Admittedly the Tele favourably mentioned the ABC a bit later when it said that "While the digitally savvy ABC has broadcast its unique digital channel ABC2 since 2005, it's taken the full eight years since free-to-air digital TV started in Australia for a commercial TV network to follow suit". Which is a good point, taking us back to "tectonic" for a moment; but leaving the ABC out of the industry remains a bit rich. Just because they don't show traditional, paid-for advertising. Let alone ignoring SBS completely (which, ahem, does accept money for adverts).

As always, go figure. It is the Tele, after all.  

Lack of news forces news.com.au to mine YouTube #media #laziness

Surely news.com.au can do better than just rehash what they find on YouTube? Apparently not! This is headed 'Most terrifying plane landings' and was written, if that is the correct term, by Kate Schneider: HOLD on to your seats and be thankful you weren't onboard these terrifying flights as we take a look at some of the scariest plane landings ever. From nearly hitting the heads of beachgoers to swinging violently from side to side, these videos show some extreme and amazing landings. Yes folks, this is the travel section! Brought to you by a quick Google of YouTube!

Yes, some scary crosswind landings there, but these videos aren't hard to find, are they? My 2 year old has seen these already. And crosswinds are part of the flying game, just as not hitting the terrain is considered a good thing. It wouldn't be so bad if Kate had actually researched the topic a bit more widely and made some more thoughtful and valuable comments. It seems to me that an airport's 'scariness' shouldn't be judged on the number of posts found on YouTube... nor would a prudent and informed writer say that pilots were 'forced' to fly close to buildings; rather perhaps they flew a safe and pre-determined glidepath that was approved by the appropriate flight safety bodies. It may be that it looks dramatic, especially when viewed through a long-focal-length lens, when if fact it was quite day-to-day for the pilots and passengers concerned to 'skim' buildings or beaches.

Maybe it was just a s-l-o-w day at news.com.au.

Dollar 'plummets' - doesn't just fall #media #economics #language

This is about language, especially the language used by the traditional media, but we'll open up with some simple economics: the Australian dollar is traded on an open marketplace and moves up and down in response to demand. (Long ago it was fixed by successive governments, mostly notably the conservative ones, but a Labor federal government reformed our currency system and floated the dollar.)

By floating or trading the currency the value of the dollar adjusts itself to the realities of, for example, importers wishing to exchange Aussie dollars for other currencies. These importers need to do this in order to buy goods and bring them into the country. Now as the dollar falls in value against any particular currency that means more Aussie dollars are needed to buy that foreign currency. This raises the local cost for the importer which will be reflected either in lessened profit for the importer or (more likely) an increased price to the consumer. The upshot of that is a fall in demand for price-sensitive imported products and more cash available to buy locally-produced products, or to invest locally. Is this good or bad? Or neutral?

To read the local Aussie press you'd think it bad, by default: Australian dollar plummets on weak US data. Note that it didn't fall - by about a cent, mind - rather it plummeted. Doesn't sound good, does it? I can imagine many readers assuming the worst.

However the flipside to a falling dollar is that exporters will be selling Aussie goods at local Aussie prices to importers in other countries, and they will receive payment in a foreign currency. As the Aussie dollar falls in value against those currencies (and it may not, as each is traded individually), they get more Aussie dollars in return for a stronger overseas currency. For example an exporter may have signed a contract in $US and will expect to get a certain number of Aussie dollars when those gratefully received US dollars arrive. However a falling Aussie dollar means they will get more Aussie dollars than they originally expected. It's a bonus, it adds value and profit to the exporter's bottom line and encourages further investment. So now, is that good, bad or neutral?

Media-speak is a wonderful thing, but it does distort the news by adding colour and flavour where none is needed. Rather than report an event, they re-write it to suit what they want to portray. Whilst some traditional media play a straight bat most of the time, all succumb to temptation over time and manipulate stories to their advantage. We know this, and put up with it. After all, we know the game-plan of each media outlet is to sell their product - or do we?