virtualeconomics

How little newspapers matter

News today is that the world's second most popular English-language newspaper, the News of the World, is to close. Most likely it will simply be replaced by a Sunday edition of the Sun (the world's most popular English-language newspaper).

Not because, like so many newspapers in the early C21st, it loses money. The News of the World makes money hand over fist (not literally of course), so much so that its closure threatens its persistently loss-making quality stablemate the Times. Printing lies about celebrities is worth a fortune and the model is replicated thousands of times around the world. 

Communication breakdown

When Haringey Council voted to close four elderly people's drop-in centres, the users of the centres contacted the council to point out that they could save the centres if they simply stopped wasting public money on publishing the cat-basket liner "Haringey People".

Dropping through the door six times a year, this self-congratulatory pamphlet serves the same two slightly sinister purposes as all such local government "newspapers" - to present the council's squandering of public money in a positive light, and to crowd out such independent local journalism as might actually subject the council to proper scrutiny.

Amusingly, when put to the vote the coucil overwhelmingly supported the continued publication of their magazine and council leader Claire Kober told the Haringey Independent newspaper that "cutting Haringey People would seriously diminish our ability to communicate effectively with residents". Any communication problem would, of course, be better solved simply by paying a modicum of attention to what those residents want - which unsurpisingly appears to be an unambiguous call for services instead of propaganda. 

(The details of the story originally appeared in the print edition of Haringey Independent - I cannot find the same story on the website, presumably a failing on my part which I will remedy as soon as a link becomes available.)

A citizen journalism model that really breaks news?

London-based citizen journalism start-up Blottr, which destealthed towards the end of February with a Techrunch write-up and recently announced a round of angel funding, led the news agenda for much of Monday by breaking the day's major UK news story. 

First publishing a few minutes after 10am, Blottr broke the news of a bomb alert in London and over the day added pictures, detail and coverage of the events in the square and the controlled explosion carried out in Trafalgar Square around 9am. Sky and the BBC picked up the story around 3 hours later, and Blottr founder Adam Baker told virtualeconomics:

"It was the only full story available of the incident for 3 hours, until Sky News put it as their "breaking" news, followed by the BBC. By this time, everyone discussing the story on Twitter (was) linking to our story, as the main source."

Maybe Demand Media's CEO doesn't use Google

Google's latest update, Panda, was targeted specifically at content farms.

This isn't ambiguous or in any way contentious. Panda, named after a Google employee but also known as the farmer update, was explictly "designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful", and while the Panda announcement itself was reluctant to use the term "content farm" an earlier blog post by Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer and co-signatory of the Panda announcement, stated that Google was targeting "“content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content". 

So when Demand Media's Richard Rosenblatt recently told Kara Swisher that "I don’t think anyone has defined what a content farm is and I am not sure what it means either"...that was a very strange claim.

The people formerly known as the media

"Billy Jones" is not, of course, the first person on Twitter to break (or pretend to break, or erroneously break) a super-injunction. All of Fleet Street knows who is named in the super-injunctions, not least because those injunctions require them to be told so they don't cover the story or name the names.

But over the past day or so Billy Jones' "Injunctionsuper" Twitter account has made a fair job of demolishing the comfortable celebrity fantasy that sending half a dozen letters to the lawyers at Northcliffe House, Wapping and Buckingham Palace Road to say that their papers are not allowed to cover some of the news is the same as keeping that news a secret.

Everyone is a media company now.

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.

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.

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.