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Signal and Noise

In 2010, more Americans got their news from the net than from newspapers, according to the State of the News Media Report 2011, recently released by the Pew Trust. “The internet now trails only television among American adults as a destination for news, and the trend line shows the gap closing,” the report stated.

The study also identifies the structural changes underlying this shift in news consumption. “In the 20th century, the news media thrived by being the intermediary others needed to reach customers. In the 21st, increasingly there is a new intermediary: Software programmers, content aggregators and device makers control access to the public. The news industry, late to adapt and culturally more tied to content creation than engineering, finds itself more a follower than leader shaping its business.”  Therefore, it’s not surprising that online ad revenue also exceeded ad revenue earned by newspapers in 2010.

Readers have certainly seen a change in the quality of news in the past decade and a half. Because the tools used to collect and disseminate information have become so inexpensive, anybody can be a reporter and a publisher. Consequently, there’s a lot more “content” available, but less actual news. At the same time, old media sources like big metro papers, are engaged in a race to the bottom as they cut costs to adapt to the new business model. In between are a lot of so-called news organizations — AOL, Demand Media, Fox News — that are predicated on the idea that content must be cheap to be profitable.

The result is that the signal has been flooded with noise. Actual news has been replaced with conjecture, opinion and amateur reporting. A related effect of this shift in the business of news is that there is no longer a sense of consensual reality. As traditional media outlets chase more narrowly defined audiences, the idea of a “mainstream view”, or center, has vanished.

New technologies have always changed the way people learn and think. The printing press, steamships, the telegraph, radio and television have all caused upheavals in the news business. The internet is no different. Soon, I hope, people will find methods and sources to pull meaning from this muddle of information.

Here are a few predictions (more baseless opinion) about the shape of the news business in the future. Old media, newspapers and television, will continue to shrink budgets and cut staff until they arrive at a profitable business model — or fold. Radio is the exception to this, probably because radio’s cost of production is already low, but also because its mode of delivery is highly portable and convenient for news consumers.

The news field will become more crowded as amateurs pile in and various crowd-source schemes are tried and discarded. The successful model will probably be programmatic: an algorithm or faceted filter that pulls from dozens of live feeds to render a digest of current events. Google News is already doing something like this with their News For You filter.

The authoritative, professional sources of news that emerge will either be subsidized or collectivized. Subsidized news has been around a long time. The BBC and the CBC are leading examples. Newer players, like Al Jazeera, will thrive with this model too. Collectivized news,  like the Associated Press and Reuters, will become more dominant as news outlets pool resources to get quality reporting. Citizen collectives like Democracy Now, Common Dreams and Wikileaks will also become more prominent.

And, finally, The New York Times’ new online subscription fees won’t add much to the company’s revenue. Although the method of implementing the new paywall is savvy, the price point is too high. At $35 a month for an all-access digital subscription, the NYT won’t see many non-institutional subscribers. For more info on that see nytimes.com/access.

Social Media Defined

Couldn’t resist this concise commentary on recent social media developments by DespairWear. Naturally, the format for this missive is a T-shirt.

Anti-social media

RIP Old Tech

In the rush toward new technology and new solutions, we often forget to discontinue old or outmoded tech. Old technology has a way of lingering on, sapping productivity, costing us money, and generally annoying the hell out of people who still use it. Rather than limp forward with a legacy of tools that no longer work, we should resolve in 2007 to make a clean start.

In the spirit of new beginnings and progress, I submit this short list of tools and technologies that should be discarded in the New Year. The list is roughly ordered in terms of cost; the most egregious money-wasters are at the top.

1. Fossil-fuel burning automobiles. This is an obvious choice and yet this centuries-old technology lingers on. Apart from the enormous social costs of automobiles, pollution and danger associated with cars, there are real and substantial individual costs. But, in an economy predicated on the automobile, good alternatives have been slow to emerge. Fortunately, there is a simple solution: move closer to where you work and sell your car. Take public transport to work — or ride a bike — and you will find that you have more money and more time.

2. Television. Who has the time for broadcast TV or cable? Who can afford to waste an hour of their life to get 18 minutes of dubious content? Use TIVO if you must, or better still; select your content online according to a schedule that suits you.

3. Incandescent light bulbs. Yesterday Australia’s government recognized just how dead this tech is by mandating a phase-out of incandescent bulbs by 2010. The shift to compact fluorescent bulbs is expected to save Australia 800,000 tons of carbon emissions annually. LEDs are even more efficient, as much as 60% more light for the money than fluorescents, according to industry estimates.

4. Fax machines. Don’t even get me started. What seemed like a miracle in 1980 is merely a nuisance today. What possible excuse can there be for maintaining this pterodactyl tech in offices now? Need a signature on a piece of paper? Sign it, scan it and attach the PDF to an e-mail. As an added bonus, you don’t have to call to make sure someone picked up your fax at the other end.

5. Phone Books. When was the last time you looked up a number in a paper phone book? Arguably, phone books are still useful to senior citizens and in places where internet service is not available, but the cost of printing and shipping these doorstops means their days are numbered.

6. Newspapers. As with phone books, this method of information dissemination has been superseded by far cheaper solutions. At the same time, the advertising model that supported the dailies has changed. Classifieds have migrated to the net and display ads look likely to follow. While newspapers may persist for a few more decades, publishers would do well to curtail their print runs and concentrate on publishing to the net.

7. IM. Instant Messaging can spell Insistent Migraine for people who are trying to work through a complex problem or follow a train of thought. Part of the beauty of e-mail it that it is asynchronous. You read it when you’re ready; not when your over-caffeinated colleague is bored and wants to chat. Persistent communication is not necessarily better communication.

8. Anonymous E-mail. The days of unverified e-mail identity are over. Now that majority of all e-mail is SPAM (see Akismet or MSNBC ) and the annual cost of handling/filtering SPAM is in the billions, the net should move to a verified identity system. In the next year or so, clearinghouses will emerge for identity management and verification. Systems like Shibboleth, which is used in academe to identify students, will vouch for the identity of senders. Savvy recipients and sysadmins will block any mail that does not have the imprimatur of a recognized clearinghouse.

9. Hard Disc Drives. Spinning HDDs all fail eventually. Flash memory looks to be more durable. Right now cost and capacity have prevented a mass flight to flash memory, but that equation is changing.

10. Signatures. I don’t know about you, but my signature is more of a graphic spasm than a valid identity verification device. Given that signatures are a voluntary form of identification and easily forged, their anachronistic persistence is a mystery. In the near future, I expect to retire my John Hancock in favor of retinal scans or some form of hand/finger scanning and verification.

Many of these systems and technologies are already out of my life. I’m hoping to be free of the rest by this time next year. What about you?

Somewhere in Colorado a Cat is Having Kittens …

. . . and here in NYC it’s a rainy Wednesday afternoon. Del.icio.us led us to the Yahoo Time Capsule. For 30 days, from October 10 to November 8, Jonathan Harris and Yahoo are collecting a digital record of life on earth. The archive assembled will then be handed over to the Smithsonian.

One day this will be an advanced search feature on Google — ‘give me all of the MP3s uploaded to Asian IP addresses last Sunday morning’. For the time being it’s a user-generated record. So chip in your little piece of reality.

The City That Never Thinks

Arch New Yorker Fran Lebowitz once said, “Polite conversation is rarely either.” A website called Overheard in New York proves it.

One of the free pleasures of living in this great metropolis are those little snippets of conversation one overhears in the course of a normal day. Overheard in New York has made a business of this urban hobby, posting a steady stream of secondhand banter from the streets and subways of the city.

The appalling thing is how dumb it all sounds. I mean, I like to think that my fellow New Yorkers are a little smarter than your average red-stater, but you wouldn’t know it to listen to us. Maybe it’s another harbinger of the apocalypse, or maybe there really is a correlation between excessive cell phone use and brain damage. I was a bit depressed about the whole thing until I found Overheard In the UK.