I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months looking at various media outlets, critiquing ideas, trying to understand what’s missing and thinking about how we can reinvigorate intelligent media and make features work for the web.
I started thinking about what I want from my media, particularly the press. Here’s a list I jotted down that’s mainly aimed at magazines, newspapers and editorial websites.
I want:
- Something that doesn’t have to take very long to read, but that I can sink some serious time into — if I choose to.
- Something that’s intelligent and deep but not tedious or pretentious.
- Something that’s engagingly designed and doesn’t simply use templates (I’m looking at you, interweb).
- Something that’s eclectic enough to keep me on my toes. I don’t want to know what to expect, and I want it tells me things that are beyond my normal sphere.
- At the same time, however, it has to be relatable, with a voice and a view of the world that I can relate to. I don’t want to be super-aspirational.
- So I want the makers to feel like a near-future version of me, not some alien being from a world where piles of money and untold influence are the norm.
- Something I can read in print, online or on my phone. Without paying extra, preferably.
- Something that uses multimedia but doesn’t force it.
- Something that degrades beautifully, with stories that should be as entertaining and meaningful in 10 years as they are today.
- Something that doesn’t try to do too much.
That’s a start.
I realise these things may not be entirely compatible or possible. However, I’d love to make something that hits these marks, and I’ve got a few ideas on how to do it. But how do you start building a high-end editorial product?
(feel free to add suggestions of your own)
⌘ People really like to think the worst of Microsoft. After President Obama’s private dinner with a handful of Silicon Valley executives, several people have wondered where on earth Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer was. This made me realise that either (a) people think Microsoft is from Silicon Valley (it isn’t, it’s based outside Seattle); (b) people think Seattle and San Francisco are nearby (it’s about the same distance as London to Barcelona); or (c ) they seem to think that Obama doesn’t consider Microsoft a top technology company (here’s an example; here’s a much funnier one. That’s a misunderstanding the nature of these private political dinners, which are essentially personal and local. They also ignore the fact that, in fact, Ballmer had lunch with Obama recently and attended a state dinner. Stupidity everywhere!
(edit, put the wrong link in to the White House lunch)
⌘ It’s not wrong to read a book very slowly. In fact, if you read it slowly enough, you can make a podcast out of it.
⌘ People can also make games about all books, including classic novels by alcoholic wastrels.
⌘ Next generation TV critic Alan Sepinwall is not necessarily brilliant, but often very engaging and invested in a way that most traditional critics aren’t - ie they seem to hate TV. He got started by writing recaps of NYPD Blue.
⌘ People are starting to do interesting things around the Kindle: the Lendle service allows you to borrow books from other people or lend out your own books to others. Must try.
⌘ The best designed newspaper in the world is, according to the Society of Newspaper Designers, Portugal’s i. Not incredibly innovative in its look, but a very clean hybrid of newspaper and magazine.
⌘ Freeman Dyson is more complicated than I realised.
⌘ You can bid for the ownership of the old Shoreditch Station, which closed five years ago. I had no idea it was so long-standing, to be honest: an underground station since 1913, and a rail station for a long time before that.
⌘ America is home to just one church designed by Sir Christopher Wren. It’s in Fulton, Missouri, but started life in the City of London. (via @vickeegan).
A few months ago I saw something about a new “slow journalism” magazine called Delayed Gratification. The idea sounded intriguing: a quarterly that tried to make a virtue of its long publishing cycle to try and turn the traditional idea of a news magazine upside down.
“Slow Journalism measures news in months not minutes, returning to stories after the dust has settled. The Slow Journalism Company offers an antidote to throwaway media and makes a virtue of being the last to breaking news.”
Frankly, being the sort of cringing ponce that I am, that sounded pretty good. I’ve been thinking a lot about long, slow, deep, layered journalism over the past year, so I signed up for a year’s subscription as a gesture of interest.
A week or two ago, the first issue arrived (covering October to December).
And it looks pretty good. Flicking through, there are some very nice moments: extremely smart graphics that pull interesting events out from the mire (October’s “born/died”, for example); some strong photo spreads that have great clarity and purpose (“moments that mattered”); and there are some interviews that are worth reading.
It’s well-designed. Yes, I’ve got a couple of bugbears (slightly small type, crammed together, a little busy in places) but it’s remarkably nice to make your way through.
But…
(I’m sure you guessed there was a but coming, didn’t you?)
But I have a few reservations. I think they boil down to three things.
First, the magazine is arranged chronologically as an almanac of the events of the three months in question. Each month was given pretty much equal amounts of space. That struck me as a little strange: if you’re deliberately liberating yourself from the tyranny of the diary, then why not go the whole way? Was December really as interesting as October? Why not let the stories take the space they deserve, even if they all happened in the same month?
Second, the features are all very short. Most of them are a page or two. A couple make it further — one piece on Anonymous’ Operation Payback, another on the English Defence League, head into four page territory for example — but they’re still not long. In fact, the Anonymous piece feels like it’s just been padded out to make it seem like a longer feature. In magaziney terms, it’s all very front-of-book (short, tasty items designed to lead you into the publication) and not very back-of-book (those long, meaty stories). I’ve already expressed my intent by subscribing to your indie magazine: I don’t think I need to be teased into reading. I want more meat.
The third point comes out of the first and second. Reading Delayed Gratification I don’t really get what’s “slow” about it, aside from the publication schedule. Most of the features felt as if they could have been written a few days after the events in question, the sort of thing you could come across in G2 or a Sunday newspaper, rather than casting that long-view look that the editors put forward. That’s not to say it doesn’t have merits — the writing is pretty good and the ideas are all there — but it never really seems to live up to that idea of returning to stories after the dust has settled.
I ended up thinking that the magazine was put together week by week: that’s why each month gets equal billing, why the features are short, why it’s crammed with information.
When it’s good, I like it. The most interesting articles are the looks back on history; the Dennis Healy feature shown above, for example. That’s the stuff I want to see, not a snakes and ladder-styles X-Factor timeline. The X-Factor! If you want to wait until the dust has settled, well… people have already forgotten who won this year’s show by the time they pick up the magazine.
I suppose my expectations were very high. I was looking for a birds’ eye view over the last three months, with a handful of deep stories looking at the subjects and events that we didn’t realise mattered until well after the fact. Pieces that connect the dots, and see patterns in disconnected events. Instead it was a fun indie news magazine. Nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t what I thought I’d be getting.
Still, it’s early days. I’m interested to see what issue two does. Often once the first issue is off the block, people can start to breathe a little bit.
In the end I like Delayed Gratification, but I think I’m looking for a different kind of slow journalism.
⌘ The song identification service Shazam employs an army of ‘music sourcers’ who go out to find new artists, remixes and club tracks to feed into the engine.
⌘ Richard Turley, a former-colleague-of-sorts-I-suppose at the Guardian, has gone on to do some very enjoyable things as creative director of Bloomberg Businessweek… giving a magazine that could be about some very boring things a lot of visual appeal. He now has a blog. I am following. (via MagCulture)
⌘ Oliver Postgate, the creator of British kids’ TV animations like the Clangers and Bagpuss, was much more political than I ever realised as a kid. (thanks to this documentary). I find that pleasing.
Over the years I’ve developed a mild but significant interest in Scientology — in the same way one might develop, say, a curiosity about the mental state of serial killers or keep an eye on the proliferation of nuclear weapons in dictatorships.
Imagine the shudder of pleasure, then, when I saw that this week’s New Yorker featured a monster piece about Scientology by Lawrence Wright called The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology. It’s an epic read that follows the travails of the Oscar-winning screenwriter, a long time Scientologist, as he quit the organisation. By and large it’s an interesting article (I passed it through @IfYouOnly, if that’s any measure of quality) and revealed a few things about Scientology that I didn’t know before.
All the way through the story, however, there is a shadow that looms over proceedings: Scientology’s lawyers.
Throughout the text, which features a series of claims made by Haggis about the behaviour of certain people and details of events, the New Yorker tries to provide the group with a right to reply. This usually takes the form of a flat rejection of what has just preceded (“The church denies this”).
There are eleven instances of “denies” in the story, but apparently that was not enough. At the very end, the magazine includes a passage in which it lays out, for the reader, the attempts made to suppress normal journalistic process:
In late September, Davis and Feshbach, along with four attorneys representing the church, travelled to Manhattan to meet with me and six staff members of The New Yorker. In response to nearly a thousand queries, the Scientology delegation handed over forty-eight binders of supporting material, stretching nearly seven linear feet.
That is followed by some 30 paragraphs in which officials dispute Wright’s findings, attempt to discredit those who believe it is a cult and attempt to prove that L Ron Hubbard was a war hero, visionary and sometime spy who healed his own crippling wounds using dianetics. Much of it hinges on some US Navy documents that Scientologists say proves his claims; the New Yorker says it asked an archivist expert with three decades of experience of military documents to take a look: in one almost throwaway line, we are told that he decrees that it is a forgery.
Now this is all good, and in a few places truly gripping. It is worth having on the public record.
But it’s also playing into their hands.
I can only assume that this detailed series of attempted refutations and demolitions was intended to be a subtle exposé of Scientology’s attempt to silence its critics. The display of power is clear, and it shows them wheeling in the lawyers to pick at every single query until (they would hope) it all unravelled or the publication gave up under the pressure.
(it’s happened before: in the 1990s, Scientology bullied the US government into granting it tax exempt status by launching a flotilla of lawsuits.
It’s an example of an organisation trying to brute force lies into the public sphere by hitch-hiking on the idea of journalistic “objectivity”. Wright and his editors walk a tightrope here, and they wobble plenty of times along the way: if even this venerable magazine struggles to get its story told in the face of legal threat, how many others are forced to spike, or kill stories because of Scientology’s muscle?
What Scientology relies on is the weakness of the press; the innate conservatism that we now see. It’s the same thing that Glenn Greenwald refers to in this spot-on piece about the way some journalists have stepped back from using the word “lie”. By refusing to pass any kind of judgement on facts — even down to the simple question of “is this true or not?” — journalism has turned the idea of objectivity into a stick to be beaten with.
The reality is that “balance” is not a see-saw. Giving lies equal weight to truth does not mean you are objective; it means you are failing in your job. And that only hands more power to those with the money, time and inclination to exert pressure on the media.
In the post-Wikileaks world, we hear a lot about governments and diplomats and corporations manipulating the media. But if there’s a greater example of a group abusing the law for its own ends than Scientology, then I’d be interested to know who they are.
Image used under Creative Commons license, from Flickr user greenboy
Russell has tried watching TV with a second screen that projects Twitter. He’s using RIG’s dextr client. I already use my iPhone as a second screen for Twitter when I’m sitting at my desk (powered by Trickle), and it would be an interesting experiment to see it deployed in this way (which I like more than, say, an on-screen version). However, we don’t currently have a TV — and haven’t really missed it that much — so I can’t try it myself.
The pitch for Entertainment Weekly, given by Jeff Jarvis to the Time board in 1988. I still like EW, although clearly its relevance in print is declining, and it is worth thinking about how the magazine’s original approach applies to our current, media-saturated world.
The sex life of slugs is fascinating. Hermaphroditic creatures that have their genitals next to their mouths, spend hours copulating in a ying-yang formation and often bite their penises off after sex. How’s that for Valentine’s Day?
Last week I wrote a piece for the BBC about Nokia, the struggling Finnish multinational mobile company, describing how its cultural quirks were — in part, at least — a reason for its troubles.
The story went far and wide, and has generated commentary elsewhere. A couple of people got in touch with me, however, to complain that I was being unfair to Finland and its people. One asked by email if I could please visit Finland so I could realize that not everybody spent all their time in saunas. Another, on Twitter, suggested I had pictured Finns as “savages in saunas” and later that “latching onto a national stereotype is cheap”.
Well, them’s fighting words. So I thought I’d address a couple of things here as a public response.
Nokia has staff who come from all parts of the world, and who work in all parts of the world. I’ve talked to dozens upon dozens of these employees over the years, both Finns and foreigners. I’ve been to Helsinki and Espoo, interviewed the company’s senior executives and shared meals with low-ranking staffers.
From many of the people I met, I heard the same story picturing Nokia as a masculine, engineering heavy company that didn’t really understand the success it had stumbled upon. While it had gone through a long period of specifically hiring non-Finnish staff to help invigorate its view of the world and contribute different perspectives, it rarely supported those individuals or admitted them into the inner sanctum (of course it rarely admitted Finnish people into its inner sanctum either, but high ranking foreigners were a distinct rarity).
So, with that in mind, this article was an attempt to lift the lid on a few of those frustrations that I have heard over the years. I thought it might also bring up parallels to other companies — not least Sony, another technology giant that turned to a North American executive to try and boost its rapidly-fading global success.
So was what I wrote offensive?
To be honest, I think that’s really a red herring. The question of whether or not it fits a national stereotype of Finnish people — and I’m not entirely sure that it does — is not the issue.*
The real question is why did I write about secret meetings taking place in saunas? It has a very simple answer: because it’s what people told me happened at Nokia.
Culture is not the only problem Nokia has, of course, but it’s one of them — and one that doesn’t get enough coverage. I’ve written extensively about the others, too. It’s not my job to be anybody’s envoy in the world, or act as a cultural ambassador between one nation and anyone who reads my writing; it’s my job to faithfully portray the issues and try and tell you things you didn’t know before.
In this, “sauna culture” doesn’t mean “a culture where people like to sit in saunas” but “a secretive, isolationist business culture where important internal politics are often conducted behind the scenes, such as in the sauna”. For companies from other countries, you might highlight the golf course or the pub as similar cultural traditions that are potentially weak spots.
If Nokia, through promoting this sort of internal culture, is projecting a poor image of Finland and of Finns to the rest of the world, then I think that’s between the company and the country. Complain to them, not me.
Should a journalist avoid writing about certain facts because they portray a stereotype, or because they are inconvenient or politically objectionable? I don’t think so. You might find them offensive, but that doesn’t mean they are untrue.
Photo used under Creative Commons license, courtesy of Flickr user Matti Mattila
*Imagine a British organization that goes global but then begins to struggle and fall apart. Insiders suggest it’s because it doesn’t understand the world around it, and that the deals and business and internal politics are all done during after-work pub sessions and the haughty atmosphere of gentlemen’s clubs. It buys into every haughty, drunken, boorish stereotype of the British — but nonetheless, it has truth. What’s the name of the company? The British empire.
This week saw the gears moving round a few clicks, with a mixture of work for GigaOM (on mechanising the news, Nokia’s troubles and its deal with Microsoft) and the BBC (including iPhone confessions and sauna culture).
Wednesday was most exciting. I was part of a Publishers’ Association event on digital books, where the assembled crowd discussed the travails of their industry — in a frank and interesting way. I don’t know if I contributed much to the panel I was on; my basic message was something like “It is a great time to be a publisher, because people have never read so much. But don’t let technology companies ride roughshod over you.”
Except, of course, more erudite and entertaining (you had to be there).
Later on I managed to pick the brains of two friends about a little idea for a project I have. One of them has a beard (Rev Dan Catt) and the other does not (Phil Gyford). (I am, of course, referring to the hairyness of the friends, not the ideas). I also caught up with RIG, saw some sekrit schemes at BERG and enjoyed a PINT with Gavin Bell and Richard Moo-ross.
There are still things to be done. Book proposal. Admin. Pitching. Money stuff. But all in all, a good week.
That is all.
As January closes and the cold weather starts to draw in again, I’ve got that feeling as if I only really exist in the space between days. I’ve managed to conduct myself fairly normally as far as work goes — a couple of days at the BBC, some stuff for GigaOM, a couple of short freelance features — but at the same time everything seems disorientingly slow.
Still, solace in the fact that my mental state can be altered by straining my brain through the twin filters of caffeine and music. Proof? There were dashes of productivity this week that astonished me.
We finally got a business bank account opened, despite the inertia which had kept it on the todo list for a couple of months. And I managed to get through most of the boring administrivia that I would rather hand off to somebody else (taxes, receipts, invoices and that sort of thing). These are moments of triumph I should appreciate more often.
There were a couple of disappointments, however.
One was professional — I had set aside some time to work on my book proposal (which is coming along) but the hours got eaten away on other things.
The other was personal: we’d originally planned to fly back to San Francisco this week for a holiday. As it turns out, the visit would have also coincided with Berkeley’s Project Censored event, where some of my work is apparently being honoured. But this is no time for jetsetting, so I had to cancel the flights. We’re hoping to be there in May at the latest, in time to run in the 100th Bay to Breakers race.
Objectives for the next week? Make it to the gym more often, finish the proposal, provide an entertaining and insightful panellist at the Publishers’ Association Here and Now event, and work on a magazine commission or two.
Small steps!
The weeks seem to be crawling by incredibly slowly. It’s just three weeks since my last *notes, and yet it feels as if it was months ago. Can I thank a moment of clarity for this? Am I in The Zone? Is it possible that I am trapped in some sort of quantum bubble that Vonnegut would be proud of?
Unlikely.
However, this treacly experience of time is not actually a bad thing. It means I’ve managed to fit a lot more into the past few weeks than I thought: publishing often at GigaOM, where I am now a regular contributor, for starters. On top of that I’m currently doing one or two shifts a week with BBC News, (a few recent pieces). Plus the odd bit here and there.
Upcoming? I’m going to be talking on a panel at a Publishers Association conference about ebooks: I believe my job will to be to scare publishers about the future. Which is funny, since I’m also working on a new book proposal.
You may know I was working on a book about robots a couple of years ago; that had to go on the back burner when I moved to San Francisco (there are only so many hours in the day). Now I’ve got another idea that might make something more current, so I’m going to spend the week sketching it out. Let’s see where it goes.
Ripping my CDs gave me a base of tracks that encouraged me to use my music player more and, eventually, paved the way for me to become a purchaser of downloads when the time was right.
This morning I sat down at my desk and looked at my Kindle, bought in September. I’ve already purchased quite a few books for it - 49, apparently, though some were free - but there’s still a dilemma.
Unlike the moment my own music suddenly became portable, my Kindle library bears no relation to the large number of physical books I own. All that effort and dedication I’ve given to publishers, booksellers and authors means nothing: I’m effectively starting from scratch. I’d really like to have access at the press of a button. I’d like to be able to search inside and root around some of those tomes quickly. I’d like to have them all within reach, wherever I was.
Being able to listen to my existing music on my MP3 player made me a bigger consumer of music over all. But unlike my CD collection, my paper library cannot easily be transferred to the Kindle. So how could you rectify this?
Well, the first option would be to repurchase all my books in digital form from scratch. Just as vinyl aficionados had to buy their stuff again on CD, I could go and buy digital copies of things I already own. They’re not all available yet, but theoretically it would work.
That’s expensive though, and to be honest I’d feel a bit cheated. A quick glance at the shelves suggest there are at least 600 books in our living room alone. At around $10 a pop on the Kindle store, that’s not really in my range. It’s venal, of course, but faced with large numbers of downloads, the cost suddenly becomes overwhelming.
I could find copies of those books online and download them. Ethically, you could argue that it’s OK: it’s personal use only, and something I’ve already paid for. I’m not sure I’m happy with it, though, and legally I can’t say I know what the situation is (it’s still technically illegal to rip a CD in Britain, after all, even if nobody really believes that to be the case).
Then I had a thought. What if I could somehow upgrade* my existing physical books so that I had a digital copy?
Could publishers offer existing owners the chance to buy an additional digital copy for a small price? What if they even let me exchange my physical copy for a digital one?
How would that work? Could it?
This process wouldn’t work for every title I own, not least because there are lots of books I own that I love precisely for their physicality, and others I couldn’t bear to part with. But there are plenty of titles that I’d love to upgrade or that are simply carriers of information that I’d happily own in a purely digital format.
(Although physical books are a great combination of information and experience, I’ve learned the hard way that you sometimes have to choose between the two: we spent a vast amount of time trying to pare down our collection when we moved back to the UK before Christmas)
But imagine a situation. You bought a copy of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall last year in hardback for £18.99. The paperback now costs £8.99. You got a Kindle for Christmas, but don’t want to buy it again for £4.49, but at what price would the publisher’s upgrade make sense? £3? £2? And what if you could donate your hardback to a library and get a digital replacement for £1 or £2? Would that entice you to do it?
The way I look at it, the upgrade/trade approach has a few upsides. Right now, publishers and authors make nothing from second hand sales, so once a physical book is out there, it means nothing to them — there’s no way to spur further activity. At least this way, they get a heavily discounted (but still valid) secondary sale. Somebody’s already paid their money for the physical object: you’re getting them to pay twice when they might otherwise not buy anything at all.
That fee can also be divided in a way that is more profitable for the publisher and author, rather than handing over money to the distributor. If an author and publisher split the profits on a £1 paperback upgrade fee, that marks a relatively significant return for work they’ve already done. Think of it as syndication.
As far as trading goes, this could be a PR win for companies: there are lots of places that want your actual, physical books. Library donation drives, Books for Africa, all sorts of programmes aimed at getting products into people’s hands.
And of course, it also encourages people to use digital book readers, which in turn spurs the sale of more books (albeit in a digital format). That’s good news for somebody like Amazon and anything that gets more people buying books — or the same number of people buying more books — is good for the industry.
It’s not without problems, of course. For a start, it’s never going to be a huge money spinner. There are security issues and copy protection to consider: for upgrade fees offered to existing purchasers, you’d have to find a way to make sure you only counted each book once (for those who trade in their physical books, the process is less open to abuse, though the overheads are higher).
And while it may appeal to Amazon, the truth is that many publishers and authors don’t really want people to encourage people to buy their books electronically, for all sorts of reasons.
But still. I’ve invested a lot of time and energy in supporting authors and publishers over the years, and I plan to carry on doing that. But I’d like to be able to make my books digital without having to buy them all over again: it would make my life richer and give me more chances to engage with the titles I already own.
It would be great if somebody made that possible.
* By “upgrade” I don’t necessarily mean that I’m getting a better product (since there are plenty of limitations to existing digital book formats) but a more technologically advanced one.
Physical/digital music player, using RFID, called c60 Redux (by IDEO and via Brain Pickings>)
What can I say about the last 12 months?
2010 ended up being the really shitty hat that 2009 wore to the party.
To be honest, it’s hard to separate the two, as far as things go. Between them, both 2010 and its predecessor were depressing and dispiriting and about as melancholic and subdued as can be.
The job I had became precarious a long time ago, but it wasn’t until 2010 that it disappeared completely. It was my choice in the end, but it came at a point when I felt like there weren’t any other choices left. And the knock-on effects were, unsurprisingly, huge. The city we loved living in became unviable. The life we’d been leading dropped away.
But I’ve got a good feeling. Going freelance has been fairly good so far — scary, yes, but definitely liberating. I’ve done some pleasing work, had a couple of serious bits of magazine work published, some stuff for the BBC and I’ve got a new part-time gig with GigaOm.
In the end, we moved back to Britain for our own sanity, and so far it’s working out. Despite my worst fears, I think 2011 might end up not looking like the last two years at all.
Happy New Year.