Reporting

The year 1500 witnessed an information revolution, when Caxton’s printing press really started to impact society in ways that were difficult to predict. Clay Shirky likens that era to now in his latest article Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, which is well worth your time.

It’s a great conversation starter, especially if you’re in the news business or indeed any form of “content” business.

After reading such an insightful person put the following, your response could be one of fear or excitement. It may depend on what business you’re in.

So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

If you have a spare weekend you could also:

- Watch a Shirky speech on video

- Plough through some analysis on pages that link to the Shirky piece

- Peek into Shirky’s research process via his Delicious bookmarks

Have fun. You never know, you might find a radical new model for a news service.

[ UPDATE 10/02/09: The Times have now published an opinion piece on this story. Keep watching. ]

In brief: while cases of measles in children are increasing, presenter Jeni Barnett on LBC radio takes a very vocal stance against MMR immunisation. Blogger and doctor Ben Goldacre opposes, on the grounds of bad science while posting a recording from the show to make his point. Almost immediately, LBC issues Goldacre with a legal takedown notice citing copyright infringement.

Or in other words, LBC begins a virtual perfect storm in blogs and the mainstream media.

You can read more about it on Techdirt, Ars Technica and other places.

Look at the average number of comments on Jeni Barnett’s personal blog (currently 2 or 3ish per post) against the comments for the two posts about MMR (at the time of writing, 82 comments for Bad Scientists and 134 comments for MMR and Me).

The killer elements of the storm are:

• an already existing health controversy
• the welfare of children
• in LBC, a popular media outlet with many listeners
• a perception of LBC as “traditional” media
• the nature of blogs as a fast, cheap and direct medium for expressing opinion
• and likewise for online comments, although more so (see also: the recordings on YouTube)
• “bad science”
• a strong feeling of solidarity among bloggers
• and particularly against lawyers as relates to copyright and freedom of speech

Search Twitter for LBC and MMR and you’ll get more reaction (that doesn’t even cover all the possible terms which relate to this story). There’s also a Facebook group called Defend Ben Goldacre from LBC with, for what it’s worth, 1048 members at the moment.

There’s a weary inevitability in the tone being used to tell this tale. As my colleague Tom remarked to me earlier today, someone should (if not already) document these frequent and grisly incidents in a dedicated blog. It could be called Blogging Blazes or something of that nature.

If you’re looking for scientifically sound advice about MMR vaccines for children, then it’s easy to find. Let’s just say that Goldacre, a qualified doctor, would certainly advise you to research more widely than a talk radio show.

Was Goldacre’s use of the copyrighted recordings a legally fair dealing? Interesting question.

But the main question I’m asking in a PR context is, why is this being considered a “fail” for LBC Radio? Their objectives are controversy and ad revenue. They’ve got the controversy and the free blog promotion (including this post).

To date, none of LBC’s advertisers has backed out over this. (Although this could happen and I’ll be certain to post an addendum here if this changes.) Whether it’s intentional or not, this situation is playing out very well for them.

Goldacre will have no trouble finding legal advisers or funding if it goes to court. And whatever the result, LBC still get headlines.

Let’s just hope it leads to better discussion and more conscientious and informed parenting, shall we?

(I’m going to try to focus on edifying things for the rest of this month! We’re working with a photographer who is doing some great work with some very diverse people and I can’t wait to tell you about it.)

[ UPDATE 06/02/09: Comments have been enabled on Alastair Campbell's site, albeit in an unusual place. At the moment it's unclear whether they apply to the whole site or each individual post. Nevertheless, you can disregard some of my criticism below as Campbell is also responding personally. He explains that the original lack of comments was down to "first day teething troubles". ]

Alastair Campbell has somewhat belatedly launched his own text blog and video blog.

For someone so strongly linked with political communications in the UK, he’s a little late to the game. But I for one am a little intrigued about how he will choose to use it.

He’s also on Twitter now as @campbellclaret – presumably a reference to his chosen football team, Burnley.

First impressions? He talks about having discussions, but there is no comment facility on the blog. Why do high profile bloggers shy from this? People will talk about you, so you might as well encourage and “own” some of the discussion. A busy comments area brings people back, especially if there’s controversy. And Campbell is not unfamiliar with that.

He’d even retain the power to moderate comments, which is again something at which he’s had plenty of practice.

Otherwise they’ll use a system like Diigo to maintain annotations about your site elsewhere, as we saw with Whitehouse.gov recently.

Incidentally, call me picky but the convention is that the whole thing is referred to as a “blog” and one article is referred to as a “blog post”.

There’s also a video blog and the first entry (I mean post) is a very slickly-edited piece with some footage from the glory years with Tony Blair and the upbeat sounds of Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al” on the soundtrack (I wonder if they sought permission for this).

It’s entertaining.

I generally think people’s expectations of online video have lowered these days. Just shoot a quick and frank piece to camera from your living room – it’s cheap, it’s immediate and it feels more open and honest. With such high production values from the outset, I’ll be surprised if he can sustain this regularly.

Silicon Alley Insider has a provocative piece about New York Times exploring a paid subscriptions scheme for its online service.

I’ll keep this brief. I just want to stoke up some of the issues around this.

These are the potential problems, as I see them, with this scheme:

• Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have already pursued paid subscription models. But their distinctive topic area is finance. As the article points out “those papers count on business readers who just charge their company for access.” Then in reference to the New York Times itself, “the general reader might not pull out the credit card for access to news that will remain available for free elsewhere”.
• It could be argued that any niche platform might have a chance of charging for content. But something as broad as the New York Times? The way people read news is different now. The paper newspaper format aggregates news about a range of subjects, but that’s partly a result of the economics of printing. A reader’s loyalty to a trusted brand for an all-encompassing news service is somewhat diminished now. Consider the physical paper newspapers you NEVER buy – but you can very easily visit an individual article, if it’s forwarded to you or you find it in a search. Who’s done this? I definitely have. A fully paid service doesn’t take advantage of this.
• For journalism these – to use the words of the Chinese – are “interesting times”. The past success of the New York Times is no guarantee of future success when that brand is extended into a paid service. The past loyalty of readers is not a guarantee of future loyalty. Really, the clearest viewpoint from which to start when designing a successful business for online news would be no legacy, no tradition and no baggage. In other words, this is not be a bold business decision but a move of desperation – it’s about a plan to “save the New York Times”. The correct plan should be “to launch a profitable online platform that publishes high quality news and articles”. New York Times has many years of journalistic experience coming up with the content, but on a business level they don’t have the luxury of taking time over this. Elsewhere, entrepreneur Marc Andreessen thinks they should shut down the costly print edition altogether.
• “Information wants to be free” from the article is a quote from Stewart Brand which is right in the sense that market forces will drive the price of a piece of information towards zero. This is economics. Given two identical options, which are you going to pick – the free version or the version where you have to pay? But whether this applies to daily news as well as encyclopaedic and other information is another question. Readers also value other things that New York Times is able to provide (such as convenience, trustworthiness and high quality of journalism).

As ever, comments are open.

This tag cloud was generated from Barack Obama’s speech and uploaded to the social photography site Flickr in double-quick time today. Here’s another.

Tag clouds have become a fascinating at-a-glance method of representing data. In this case, we see the words that Barack Obama has emphasised due to repetition.

Tag clouds began as a navigational aid for websites. Here’s a live example representing the content of the many thousands of pictures and photographs stored on Flickr itself. Each word is a link with the most common words given greater prominence.

I’m not sure which tool these used – if you want to generate your own, one such tool is Wordle.