virtualeconomics

Has Stephen Fry quit Twitter (again)?

Almost a year to the day since he last quit Twitter Stephen Fry seems to have abandoned his celebrity microblog yet again, this time because of the response to an interview which he, err, linked to himself (in an earlier tweet which has since disappeared). Follow the link for details - in short, Fry suggests that straight women don't like sex as much as gay men do or they'd be at it behind the bushes on Hampstead Heath too.

Several curious things here. First, though he claims to have been misquoted he made much the same comments in a live interview which is still lying around on Youtube (thanks steerpikelet, via nisaba). Second, the opinions in question are expressed more-or-less verbatim by the hero of his 1994 novel The Hippopotamus, debauched and aging poet Edward Wallace. Perhaps the prior fictionalisation of this train of thought lends credence to Fry's implication that he was joking; perhaps it merely confirms that this is something he has thought for an awfully long time. I cannot of course know, but the weight of evidence now points towards the latter. Third, quite apart from the understandable limitations of his knowledge of female sexuality, his impressions of gay male sexuality seem inexplicably ill-informed too. See some recent OKcupid research for a simple debunking of the common media fallacy that gay men are unusually promiscuous - such a tiny percentage of gay men are up to anything at all in the bushes on Hampstead Heath that the barest handful of women would have to be as well for it to even out.

I really hope he's joking (again) and comes back (again). 2 million people enjoy his tweets every day and I've personally admired his work for as long as I remember being alive. But it seems implausible to dismiss opinions he's expressed in at least three media over the course of almost twenty years as a joke that got out of hand, merely because this is the day that those opinions have created a little popular disapproval. This is not about being right or wrong. This is about having the courage of your clearly long-held convictions.

Update: Ah, he's back. Glad that all got sorted out then.

Update: Nope, he's gone again and the "buy buy (my book)" tweet has gone too.

Update: looks like he's coming back - here's his long explanation of what happened.

Robot situation worse than previously imagined

A few days ago I posted the results of the latest global robot census, noting that the domestic robot population of the world had gone up more than tenfold in the past six years. Today I saw dramatic proof of this previously dry demographic statistic as I passed through Newcastle station.

Dear Take That fans, these are called "supply and demand curves"

Surprise once more echoed round the pop world as tickets for Take That that were put on sale at dramatically below market value sold out almost instantly, delayed only by the technical limitations of the websites and phone lines put in place to transact the things. Given how greatly the demand for tickets exceeded the supply at this artifically low price, and given the element of luck involved in getting through either online or by phone, by underpricing their tickets Take That (or more likely their clearly inspired commercial team) have simply created a lottery in which a relatively small number of people, selected at random from amongst those who wanted tickets for one reason or another, have acquired those tickets for a fraction of their actual value.

The sell-out was almost immediately followed by outrage from fans that people who had managed to acquire the manifestly underpriced tickets were now realising their actual value by putting them on eBay. The same outrage has been expressed at various times by other concert organisers and performers who for some reason imagine that they should be able to set both the supply and price of their goods without any reference to demand. Last year Ricky Gervais complained

"Tickets for my Edinburgh show are changing hands for £200. Please don't buy them. The people selling them are scum...I have tried to stop this happening but I can’t. I’ve tried holding tickets back for sale on the night. I've tried putting gigs on sale at the last minute so people don't have time to put them on eBay, but nothing works."

The problem here is not profiteering, but the reality that if you leave bundles of twenty pound notes lying around on the floor people will pick them up. And actually, two things would work here. The first is to increase the supply so that demand for each individual show fell to whatever price per ticket the perfomer insists is the right one. If Take That, Ricky Gervais et al insist that fans must be able to see them for £2o they can simply keep playing until they have put on the number of shows that brings the price down to that level. Rather more ingeniously, one commentor pointed out last time I discussed this issue that they could also manipulate demand by lowering the quality of their output so that demand, at the level of supply they happen to have chosen, matched the supply of performances at the price at which they happen to want to sell the tickets. Take That would not have sold out, even at £20 per ticket for a relatively small number of gigs, if they had made a credible commitment to suck. Perfomers who (bizarrely) insist on choosing the level of both price and supply for their performances might take note - there's really very little you can do to manipulate the supply and demand curves, but reducing the quality of the product is one solution that falls within your gift.

On the day 250,000 of America's smartest march on Washington, the big news is that a bomb hasn't gone off in Birmingham

Yesterday was of course the Rally to Restore Sanity, Jon Stewart's semi-satirical anti Tea Party gathering in Washington that expected to draw 60,000 and at current estimates saw 250,000 show up. And not just any 250,000 - we already know that satirical news audiences are the best informed people out there, so this - as you could tell from reports of the signs ("if your idea can fit on a sign you need a bigger idea") - was 250,000 of America's brightest and best.

In England we like to laugh at the US news as ludicrously insular and US-centric. So it's hardly a proud day for us that even by 10.15pm the UK's main TV news was ignoring the story in favour of an infantile bit of name-calling amongst our own political non-entities and a bomb that didn't go off in Birmingham. You'd know it was happening if you followed the relevant commentators on Twitter, and of course the Guardian had the story, but otherwise the most interesting event in world politics today is going under the radar. (Here's a picture that captures the scale of the rally.)

Jeff Jarvis spent the day at the rally, and explains why so much of the media - not just in the UK but even on Washington's doorstep - is either ignoring or belittling the event:

"The coverage of the rally I've seen so far tends toward the dismissive, as does its play on the home pages of The New York Times and Washington Post. "Nonpartisan bits, musical entertainment and gentle ribbing of the purported enemies of incivility," is the Post's view of it. Cute. Unimportant. A trifle. Pay no heed to its complaints about us; it's just a joke, after all. Ex-Postie Howie Kurtz was surprised at the size of the event. He underestimated. I didn't. He called it "shtick" and "weak" at that. His was an entertainment review. That's how The Times saw it, as "part circus, part satire, part holiday parade." You know how those kids love a parade with clowns, yet."

Journalism's desire to present a "balanced" view may once have arisen from noble motives. It may once stemmed from the sincere pursuit of impartiality and a desire to present the public with competing points of view, untainted by the opinion of the journalist or more importantly their employer. But somehow along the way journalism's pursuit of "balance" got broken and journalists are ignoring the rally because Colbert called them out on it. From Colbert's closing speech to yesterday's rally:

"...we live now in hard times, not end times.  And we can have animus and not be enemies...But unfortunately one of our main tools in delineating the two broke.  The country’s 24 hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems but its existence makes solving them that much harder.  The press can hold its magnifying up to our problems bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic."

Journalism's duty to inform public debate has been hopelessly derailed by the pursuit of a balance chimera, an illusion that requires two competing points of view to be aired even when only one legitimate or credible point of view exists and that has descended into the mere pursuit of ratings through the fabrication of simplified, polarised controversy.

Academic research by Jeremy Burke shows us that the pursuit of "balance" leads to information loss. This problem arises when journalists attempt to cover any news on which any minority can present itself as telling "other side of the story", for example during coverage of the financial crisis, and of course the attempt to present scientific debates in a "balanced" way gave us the grotesque spectacle of a global warming "controversy" that in scientific terms did not exist; quoth John Lanchester:

"Since the climate debate has been polarised on left-right lines in the US, it has seemed appropriate to the media to treat it as a polarised issue, one on which there are two schools of thought, which, in respect of the science, it isn’t: there is one school of thought, and a few nutters."

In political terms, "balance" has simly become the fabrication of polarised controversy which trivialises the political dialogue, "whereby I say yah because you said boo", which quarter of a million people marched on Washington yesterday to protest. Well, here's a legitimate controversy for you to report. Journalists, you evidently think that the pursuit of balance is a Good Thing, even though it leads to information loss, fictitious debates and the infantilisation of the political dialogue. Colbert and quarter of a million of his supporters just called you out. How about reporting that?

(Picture from Public Citizen on flickr)

(A version of this post that I was much less happy with appeared last night. So I changed it)

Robot population up tenfold in last six years

Back in 2004 the UN kicked off an annual census of the world's robot population and concluded that there were slightly more than 600,000 domestic robots in the world - that's excluding industrial robots of the sort that one commonly imagines making cars. The story was covered by Collision Detection, Slashdot and others at the time, with Collision Detection commenting

"Words fail to express my unbridled delight that global civil servants actually spend their time collating this information."

This was, perhaps, taken to heart by the guys at the UN because since 2007 the robot census has been carried out privately by these guys, and last month they noted (pdf) that in the same approximate category of robots ("service robots for personal and private use") in 2009 the global population stood at "about 5.6 million units for domestic use and about 3.1 million units for entertainment and leisure...". That's a global population of 8.9 million robots, more than ten times what it was when the UN kicked off this survey in 2o04. Most of thjese, it notes (pdf), are vaccum cleaners and mowers, and many of them are merely toys, but it does include robots to assist the handicapped, robots for personal transportation and - slightly worryingly - robots for home security and surveillance.

Image from FlySi

i

"The first quality paper to be launched in Britain for almost 25 years" (since The European in 1990? Since Metro in 1999? Charitably I will assume that the error here is innumeracy, not the hubris to claim the Independent is the last quality newspaper launched in the UK). So what's the first edition like?

First (and second) impressions

Like the iPad, the first impression is of a solution looking for a problem that quite possibly doesn't exist. The first two pages appear fundamentally misconceived, a collection of extremely short-form news that looks a little like an index (but unlike the useful bit of an index doesn't direct the reader to the longer versions within) and a little like the front page of a news site (but unlike the useful bit of a website doesn't have any links to read more at greater length). It's almost as if the newspaper's creators had taken away precisely the wrong lesson from the move of news online - yes, people like to read summaries of the news, but then they like the option of somewhere to go to learn more.

And the second impression is of a mish-mash of content without any real prioritisation. There is a sports section at the back but some sports news apparently warrants being up front (Chilean miners play football for some reason). Personally I value the convention that sports news merits its own section so I can avoid it like the plague. There is a business section, in much the same way that all newspapers with aspirations to seriousness must apparently have a business section, but it is so abbreviated and the selection of constituents so arbitrary that it seems to exist merely to give the impression that business is being covered rather than in any real hope that anyone could rely upon it as their source of business news. Last I checked, the FT and City AM and WSJ and Marginal Revolution are still there, so why is this? 

A digital strategy? Not so much 

Let's not even talk about the rookie mistakes they've made online. Not having a website is one thing, but calling your new product "i" just means no-one will be able to find out anything about it via search. I've searched for commentary about the paper today and still the only way I can find it is by guessing which commentators would mention it and manually scrolling through their recent posts. 

Plenty to like

So what's actually to like about it? Plenty. There's almost nothing dull - every story, in its selection, composition and brevity, is worth the glance that it takes to consume and Kelvin Mackenzie nailed it calling the paper "light, frothy, interesting". The advertising is surprisingly attention-grabbing, both in format and selection of companies. The two third-page strips for Orange and T-mobile on pp24-25; the ad for Google on p9 genuinely intriguing; and there's lots of it (more than in today's Independent itself, I hear). Someone has really solved the problem of how to design an ad-funded medium around the users, given the dilemma created by having two sets of users - advertisers and readers - with diametrically opposed needs. Also, my first glance at the TV listings page made me mutter aloud "now that's clever", cos it is - grouping TV listings thematically makes them dramatically more useful (disclaimer - I never look at TV listings, so maybe I am once again being impressed by something that everyone's being doing for a decade). 

The bottom line - "i" will have a very healthy bottom line

Finally, the business model - more specifically, what I infer about the sales pitch to advertisers - is genius. Both Deborah Ross and Simon Kelner talk about the paper's audience as "time poor" and "busy" and here we see a very intelligent piece of commercial positioning. Who is time poor? Well, that'd be people who are busy making money. For 20p they might just be able to snatch a few minutes on their commute, after catching up with emails on their Blackberry and before watching last night's Inbetweeners on their iPad. It's a pitch which, so far, works dramatically well at attracting all the right (high-yield finance, tech) advertisers. As long as they can get people to pick the thing up every day their sales team has a great pitch to make - "time poor" (and therefore cash-rich) people are reading, and that's an audience everyone likes. 

Moving on from localpeople

Today was effectively my last day as Head of Publishing at localpeople. As I told my team yesterday, having taken redundancy my plan for the foreseeable future is to have a lovely long rest (maybe a year or two, not joking) and spend as much of my time as possible playing with my lovely new twins (four months old this Saturday), barring anyone offering me the opportunity to do something so unexpectedly fascinating or well-paid that I can't resist.

Localpeople's been a great place to work, and I've had a lot of fun being part of the team that took it from a piece of market research and a strategy presentation in the DMGT boardroom to a network of 123 local websites. As I pondered to someone the other day, my best guess is that no-one, with the possible exception of Arianna Huffington, has enjoyed the opportunity to hire so many new journalists in the last eighteen months, and I've loved the job of finding towns in which to launch new websites, hiring and training Community Publishers for those sites and helping drive forward a genuinely exciting new venture at the intersection of journalism and social media. It's been a fantastic couple of years, a privilege to work with a great team and I wish localpeople all the best taking the business to new heights in 2011 and beyond.

Update: here's more on my move from Journalism.co.uk

Spot the difference between journalism and Soylent Green

WaPo tells its journalists not to respond to tweets. NPR kicks out Juan Williams for expressing a personal opinion (and not even on NPR - on Fox News, a completely unrelated network) and forbids its journalists from attending political rallies. What's the story here? That journalists are just people, saying things and writing words like everybody else, but the news organisations that employ them are terrified of anyone finding out because if their journalists are just people then the proclamations of those news organisations are not the voice of god but just the opinion of some guy. And in a wired world, the opinions of some guy really aren't that special, or hard to come by, or (here's the kicker) necessarilly mediated by the likes of NPR or the Washington Post. 

Here's the interesting bit from NPR CEO Vivian Schiller:

"A critical distinction has been lost in this debate. NPR News analysts have a distinctive role and set of responsibilities. This is a very different role than that of a commentator or columnist. News analysts may not take personal public positions on controversial issues; doing so undermines their credibility as analysts, and that's what’s happened in this situation. As you all well know, we offer views of all kinds on your air every day, but those views are expressed by those we interview — not our reporters and analysts."

And here's the interesting bit from Raju Narisetti at WaPo's "don't answer back" memo:

"Perhaps it would be useful to think of the issue this way: when we write a story, our readers are free to respond and we provide them a venue to do so. We sometimes engage them in a private verbal conversation, but once we enter a debate personally through social media, this would be equivalent to allowing a reader to write a letter to the editor - and then publishing a rebuttal by the reporter. It's something we don't do."

Journalists (even news analysts) are just people. The things they write and the opinions they express are just words, written by people. The opinion of the Washington Post or NPR (or yes, even The Economist with its uniquely faceless, byline-less prose) is just the opinion of some people. But if news organisations admit that behind the curtain are just people writing words...well, what's so special about them or their opinion and how are they, publishing those words online, different to anyone else with an opinion and ten minutes to spare knocking up a blog? The solution currently favoured at WaPo and NPR is no solution at all. We know that someone has to write the words. Even if they pursue the balance chimera, even if they pretend to have no personal view, even if they decline to participate in debate or go to rallies, no-one's going to be fooled. So just give it up and join in guys. By being part of the conversation you'll gain more credibility than you lose.

Dull, incomprehensible and utterly terrifying

The global financial crisis has all the hallmarks of an absoutely terrible news story. Unless you happen to be an economics wonk it's just not interesting that the distant, shadowy figures who run some banks and government agencies have moved incomprehensibly vast sums of money around in ways that are, to the casual observer, barely different to the ways in which they were moving incomprehensibly vast sums of money around before. And yet, even to the casual observer, it's evident that the collapse of the global economy is probably a Bad Thing and you should be very (very) scared. So Dan Froomkin makes a very fair point - that no-one in the mainstream media is really covering the latest developments in foreclosuregate.

Foreclosuregate is a criminal conspiracy to systematically defraud, carried out by banks and their agents and hastily covered up by governments, and it has created the biggest economic crisis in living memory. The perpetrators are back running banks that by any sensible definition are insolvent, they are taking home seven figure bonuses for doing so, and in the UK the Chancellor has just announced a new age of austerity that will only make the problem worse.

The challenge here for the news media is to make the biggest story in the world - and make no mistake, right now this is the biggest story in the world - interesting and comprehensible enough for people to talk about. Interesting and comprehensible enough to run on every front page. Interesting and comprehensible enough that readers - voters, citizens, you know, that third estate that the fourth allegedly exists to watch out for - can understand and debate it and raise it with their representatives. At Nieman Watchdog Dan Frooman has achieved this; you can read here what's going on. But not everyone reads Nieman Watchdog. I want to see this covered by NYT, WSJ, the BBC. I don't see it yet.

It's not surprising that this is a challenge that, so far, journalism has comprehensively ducked. A story that is dull, incomprehensible and terrifying is a very hard story to run. But this is what we have journalism for. This is why people train for years and practice for more years at the craft of explaining the news, and the importance of the news, to readers. If journalism cannot do this, if it cannot meet this challenge and solve this difficult problem, then journalism simply doesn't work.

(Image © Copyright John Went and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence)

New study: serious news great for serious brands. But what about the response?

A day or two late to this party but the recent Perfect Market Vault Index study raises some questions for me that I haven't seen addressed elsewhere. If it's true, I believe it reveals a dramatic shift in online display advertising to pure branding, because no-one is going to be clicking on these ads.

 
First, if you missed it, the study: tracking "more than 15 million news articles from 21 U.S. news sites, including those of The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Chicago Tribune from June 22 to September 21, 2010" combined a traffic with cpm (rate paid by advertisers per ad impression) score to show that the most commercially valuable news over the period were serious, mostly economic, topics such as unemployment or mortgage rates. Here's the release; here's a follow-up blog post which aims to quash the theory that fluff news - celebrity gossip etc - is still more valuable commercially because even at lower rates per ad it generates so much more traffic.

Over at GigaOm Mathew Ingram has already pointed out that even if that's the case, you still need the fluff to drive traffic volumes - advertisers might ideally prefer to have their ads sit alongside serious news but you can't even get them to take your calls until you have user numbers in the millions and for most sites that means covering whatever's most popular. As I tweeted when I first saw the study, I also think it doesn't tell us as much about the value of specific news topics or articles as the study seems to claim - only that that b2b, luxury consumer brands and consumer financial service advertisers pay the highest cpms and target the channels where serious and finance news happens to sit. To believe that unemployment news is intrinsically more valuable to advertisers as a topic you'd have to believe that they were really targeting their ads to those stories, and display advertising just isn't bought or sold, on most websites, with that level of sophistication.

The interesting bit for me is the implication that these valuable display advertisers are willing to spend so highly on pure branding. We know that they won't be generating any sort of significant response from advertising against hard news because of multiple previous studies carried out by AOL and comScore as to who is clicking on ads - a hard core of lower-demographic regular clickers. Most people don't click a single display ad in a month. Most clicks are accounted for by the same 6% of users. These aren't the people who read serious news (just ask the ad sales departments of any of the serious news websites in the study, they'll be happy to tell you about their audience of ABC1s - precisely the people who don't click).

So the Perfect Markets study is interesting for me, because it suggests that serious brands are paying significant cpms with news sites for a pure branding advantage. They must know they're not getting any clicks. So good news that it's possible to monetise hard news; but more interesting still how it's most likely being monetised.