virtualeconomics

Little more than a glance at the new economics of news

Strange to see Scout Analytics' latest infographic on the disparity between online and print news revenues getting so much coverage. It's obviously true, but it's also just a fairly superficial restatement of a small subset of the known facts.

Is online news worth less than offline news because less time is spent reading it (both absolutely and relatively), because of anchoring at "free" and because of commoditised online ad rates? Well...sort of. Partly. It's true as far as it goes.

First, this isn't about news.

If newspapers really cared about the freedom of the press, most of them would close tomorrow

There's been a lot of talk about press freedom of late, what with the rich and powerful taking out super-injuctions and attempts by special interest groups such as the GMC to exempt themselves from press scrutiny.

The common theme here is, of course, that as fewer people read newspapers and newspaper company revenues decline the power of news organisations to hold even the minor celebrities within their own ranks to account, let alone to talk truth to power, evaporates.

Newspapers had the power to unearth and reveal secrets because they wielded vast political and economic influence and could afford the best lawyers. Celebrities, politicians, plutocrats and even doctors increasingly think it a safe enough  bet that actually they now have the best lawyers, and even if the Sun won it for the Tories in 1992 no-one even in Wapping seriously pretends it will ever carry such political weight again. Twenty years later the Telegraph spent the better part of a year spinning out the revelation that practically every member of the lower house had systematically stolen from the public purse and the political fall-out was inconsequential - the barest handful of sacrificial imprisonments and the rest allowed to continue on their way. Insofar as serious investigative political journalism is still attempted outside the pages of Private Eye and - utterly bizarrely - Rolling Stone its key practitioners are currently being tortured by the US military or going through the slow process of being quietly shipped off to the same fate by obedient European governments. 

Privacy and publicity

Three things interest me about the John Snow debacle (if you haven't followed the saga of a Soho pub kicking out two gay drinkers for kissing, summary here), two of them mainly about Facebook.

First, the incident itself seems to indicate that the internet has made the maintenance of private little fiefdoms of bigotry harder than ever. Run a covertly homophobic, racist or otherwise unsavory pub even ten years ago and it was non-trivial for anyone to do much about it. Now that a protest as peacefully whimsical as a kiss-in can be knocked together on Facebook, not once but as often as the pub tries to lock the protestors out, it's much harder. I'm as much a fan of cultural diversity and people being allowed to do what they like as the next virtual federalist, but one of the consequences of freedom, even the freedom to be a bigot, is bearing its consequences - including nationwide calumny and what looks increasingly for the John Snow's current management like financial disaster.

A decision so trivial we can be trusted to make it ourselves

As we gallop towards voting on May 5th the thing that most strikes me about the AV campaigns is not just the feebleness of both campaigns but that if these were ads for anything except how to run the country they would be illegal.

The "No" campaign is feeble in crass and obvious ways. Fronted on TV by a fictitious politician from the last century (not David Cameron, boom boom), its core arguments appear to revolve around the expense (there is none), the complexity (which depends on explaining AV disingenuously badly to a classroom of obligingly dim-witted straw men) and the unfairness of second or third choice candidates coming first. I gather this really is, very occasionally, mathematically possible under AV, and would if we adopted it occur on average about once per century. It is not significant.

Always willing to try a new user interface

Visiting my parents this weekend I thought I might make use of their print edition of the Observer. After all, every weekend I follow links from @realdmitchell and @victoriacoren to their articles in there - I quite like the Observer, I read its content, it was just sitting on the sofa next to me, why not give it a whirl?

I discovered almost immediately why not. The UX is unuseable nonsense. Look at the thing! A big pile of pieces of paper stapled together into sections apparently selected by theme. I've no idea which of these sections David Mitchell or Victoria Coren's articles are in - I doubt they're considered "Food Monthly", and they're probably not "Sport" unless poker is a sport, or David Mitchell is having one of his occasional anti-football polemics. But there's no viable search function apart from a big ad on the front page of the news section for the one magazine that I'm pretty sure they're not in.

Why no-one cares about the royal wedding

Briefly: it's a fair generalisation for The Economist to say that no-one in Britain cares about the imminent royal wedding, beyond a frisson of idle glee at the thought of an extra day off work. I'm just old enough to remember the last one (I was five) and it was a big deal.

What has changed in the intervening thirty years? Everything that made royalty exceptional has become unexceptional. Their antics are therefore much less interesting.

Thirty years ago they were extraordinarilly rich, privileged and idolised despite having achived nothing of the remotest substance beyond an accident of birth. Today such people are the foundation of our utterly trivial daily newsflow, from celebrities who are famous for little more than singing badly but photogenically to bankers who retire into a life of conspicuous idleness on the proceeds of a handful of years spent picking stocks at random. Thirty years ago my childish notion that the Queen was the richest and most famous person in the world was at least plausible; today the idea that Prince William is either notably rich, famous or even powerful by the standards of the super-rich celebrity elite is laughable.

The pages of OK and Hello carry weddings just as notable practically every month. No wonder no-one cares overmuch about this one.

Salaryshare and the data opportunity for jobs aggregators

It always worries me when I see companies launch that it seems any one of a dozen other companies could trivially kill with a few days dev work. I wonder if I'm missing something.

SalaryShare lets you see what your friends/colleagues/random strangers earn by pooling salary data anonymously from anyone who chooses to share it and then revealing the range of salaries disclosed to all participants. Nice idea. I have indeed occasionally been curious as to what other people earn.

Thing is...if people want to know that badly, can't one of the jobs boards (or more usefully jobs aggregators) simply store data on the salaries that were listed on historical job ads and make it searchable?

Crazy Twitter spam de jour

Crazy Twitter-spam presumably intended for shut-ins:

"Sick of Hayfever? Simply lock the POLLEN OUT OF YOUR HOUSE with WindowFilta as seen on TV (I am omitting the link)".

Yup, assuming I never left my house that would solve the problem an absolute treat. I hope they sent it to me because I mentioned hayfever in a tweet, not because I tweet so much their behavioural targeting software can tell I never go out. I have a smartphone damn it! For all they know I could be tweeting from a party on a frickin yacht.

Harvesting soft power, squandering soft power

Since Joseph Nye coined the phrase more than twenty years ago the US has gone to great lengths to defend and expand the ambit of its soft power - the message of Hollywood, the American music industry and the whole apparatus of monocultural hegemony that every day is whispered into nearly seven billion ears "America is best. America is right. Everyone would be American if they could".

It isn't, after all, merely the persuasive talents of the music and film industry lobbyists that lead the American congress, senate, president and judiciary to work so tirelessly in the interest of those industries. It's the perfectly sincere self-interest of a great power at work. So when copyright law is endlessly revised at both the statutory and case level to better serve the demands of the MPAA and RIAA; when the diplomatic efforts of the state are turned to expanding that American copyright law to the corners of the earth; when "Homeland Security" means not the fight against post-9/11 terrorism but the seizure of alleged copyright infringing domains; when the rights of American people and technology innovators alike are routinely trampled so that funding continues uninterrupted for the American message; that's America defending its soft power. That's diplomacy, statecraft; what Rochau and Bismarck called realpolitik. 

The odd thing, then, is not that the US will go to such lengths to safeguard its soft power. The odd thing is that the UK baulks at spending less than £250m to safeguard its own.

"So many people they crashed the website!"

Twice this morning the BBC's news presenters claimed that something had become so instantly popular that its website had crashed. One was some coverage by the BBC itself for the royal wedding; one was the Action for Happiness website, which was mentioned on the show and at time of writing is still down.

For some people, having a website crash appears to be a badge of pride - it is paraded as proof that the cause or the publication or the thing in question enjoys such widespread popularity and support that the whole internet has come to join the party.

Of course, it proves no such thing.