BuzzMachine

The Times of London is going to start printing in New York, the Guardian reports. I’d heard that Times Editor Robert Thompson was in New York last week, apparenty preparing for invasion. The Guardian says:

The US launch, with an initial print run of several thousand and a sample price of $1 a copy, is likely to be seen as an attack on the Financial Times, the only British paper printed in New York.

I’ll also predict that this is the first shot in another British war to be fought here. The Guardian’s popularity and brand have grown considerably since the web … and since the Iraq war. Americans are looking for alternative views and for journalistic voices that are more transparent about their perspectives, like the British press. (Full disclosure: I write and occasionally consult for The Guardian.)

But the real battle isn’t in print at all. The Guardian quotes a senior Times exec:

The aim is to enhance its online readership as well as give the paper a US presence. “This is really an online play. There is no better billboard in America than a newsstand,” said the executive.

There you have it: Print has officially become value-added promotion to online. And online allows these brands to expand internationally without relying on the cost and limitations of print. So now the battle is on.

: Here’s The Times’ own announcement.

Adrian Holovaty, the most creative and the most creatively productive guy we still have in the news biz in this country, gives the commencement speech at his j-school alma mater:

…But, most of all, the foundation is important because you need to understand the rules before you can break them. And now, more than ever, this industry needs to break some rules….

Graduates, the fire should be burning under each and every one of you. You should be yearning — aching — to bring this industry into a new age. Your generation — our generation — is going to be the one to do it. You’re going to be the people breaking the rules. You’re going to be the people inventing new ones….

Nico Flores, a blogging friend from the BBC, writes a provocative post about content:

Content is nothing on its own. It only exists as part of conversations — understood not in the usual ‘blogsphere’ sense of deliberation, but as shared concerns (not my term), concerns that we must partake in to be part of communities. When I buy a novel I choose it not just because I think I might enjoy it, but also because it is also being read by other people, because it’s part of a larger movement that I’m interested in, or because it is relevant to something else I read. Reading is satisfactory only if I bring with me a certain baggage; and reading will add to my baggage, allowing me to appreciate other works and, crucially, to have more of a shared background with people around me. My point is that content–or, more precisely, the transaction of consuming content–is only meaningful as part of a wider conversation that is made up of countless related transactions.

He goes on to write about the role of discovery in content itself.

When Clay Shirky and I first saw AOL’s blogging tools and they fretted about the junk that may be created, we told them that “it’s not content until it’s linked.” That’s a glib line, but it’s in sync with Nico’s point about the larger definition of content.

Content does not exist without context. In the past, that simply meant we needed to know more about the creator or the time: The Diary of Anne Frank is about its context.

Part of what I’m trying to argue in my speculations about the fate of books is that context both defines and enriches content. Without that context, the content is poorer. The ability to link to and from content and its antecedents and successors in a chain of criticism, contribution, questioning, correction, argument, and remixing becomes part of the content itself. The timing of content matters, of course. What content does not say says a lot about it, as well. Who creates or consumes content also defines that content; chick lit is chick lit because it is written and read by chicks. And thanks to the ability of digital media to capture our content actions, the act of consumption is now an act of creation; our iPod playlists, our Amazon breadcrumbs, our Google clicks, our Flickr links, and our RSS aggregations are all collections of interaction with content that become content themselves.

But cutting off content from such conversation, in Nico’s broader use of the term — by imprisoning writing only in books or story-telling only on a disc or journalism behind a wall — we rob that content of content.

Kenji Mori says it well:

It might not be Yahoo alone, but most of us have long been accustomed to organizing information in a hierarchical manner, breaking the whole into pieces or parts by directory, so that we are comfortable calling the starting page “the top page.” It is time to think in the opposite. Why not call it “the bottom page,” from which we initiate queries and update our boundaries as we move up along the way.

Jonathan Rintels writes a rousing attack on the indecency fraud committed by Congress, the FCC, and their coconspirators at the so-called Parents Television Council, et al, in the wake of the Senate’s late-night passage of its indecent indecency bill.

So, this is a great victory for America’s parents, right? Hardly.

Those tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of complaints we all keep hearing about – they’re, well, forgive me, I know it’s too easy, but I can’t resist – they’re bullshit. They’re a fraud.

The FCC received approximately 6,500 complaints about an episode of CBS’s hit show “Without a Trace,” which featured a brief scene of a teen sex orgy. With so many offended Americans complaining, no wonder the FCC imposed a $3.6 million fine on CBS and its affiliates, even though the “Trace” scene was hardly remarkable to anyone who has ever watched music videos or soap operas.

But a Wall Street Journal review of the numbers found that of those 6,500 complaints, all but three appeared to originate as computer-generated form letters.

The PTC claims credit for submitting thousands of complaints to the FCC about the April 7, 2003 episode of Fox’s “Married by America” that the Commission ultimately fined $1.2 million. But blogger Jeff Jarvis, former TV Guide critic, used the Freedom of Information Act to discover that “all but two came from the so-called Parents Television Council’s automated kvetch-machine.”

According to an investigation done by the conservative Progress and Freedom Foundation [pdf], when the PTC emails its list-serve to complain about a show, a single click on its email complaint form can generate six or more “complaints” since the FCC counts separately each complaint to each Commissioner’s office and other FCC offices. Making these numbers even more phony, there is no requirement that the complainer’s children or even the complainer himself actually view the offending show, let alone be offended by it. It’s the PTC/FCC version of click-fraud.

Both the WSJ investigation and mine show that there are just three prudes in America — plus 100 in the Senate.

[Sullivan readers: For the full discussion, click on the books tag.]

Some more conversation and links roiling around the post I wrote the other day about killing books to save books (which, just to be clear, means that I want to save books by enhancing books with the new opportunities the digital age brings… ditto newspapers… ditto television… ditto all media).

: NewWest’s Jonathan Weber in The Times of London:

Books, for starters, are about a lot more than “communicating information.” I like having books around because I find them pretty, for example. Their somewhat random presence is a reminder of things past, almost always in a nice way. A well-made book has a very pleasant feel, a tactile sensation that makes you want to hold it. The words themselves are only a part of it.

And when we think about the words, the “information”, it’s hard to separate them from the way in which they are being read. Books are usually read in a different physical context, and in a different mental space, than other types of reading material. They are, at their best, things that transport you, take you to another world, probably one far, far away from the frenetic information exchange that is the internet.

Mr Jarvis gripes that books represent “lecture media” – the bad old kind of media in which the professionals tell it to the laymen, as opposed to the good new kind of media that is a conversation among peers. Now Mr Jarvis is an evangelist of conversation media, but still: lectures have their place. I’m not looking to have a conversation with Dostoevsky, or Don DeLillo, or even a great non-fiction writer like Robert Caro. I’m looking to be carried off by their words, enchanted by their artistry, and the fewer digital distractions and yammering commenters, the better.

: In the SF Chronicle, Al Saracevic reacts to the Carrmudgeon attack:

But in all seriousness, it’s always fun to watch intellectuals spar, but the underpinnings of this debate go to the core of modern philosophical debate. Do we believe in mob rule, where any and all group discussion is an improvement, as the digital utopians do? Or do we celebrate the artist, the expert and the author as cultural beacons?

Jarvis says: Print is where words go to die.

Carr says: The Web is where culture goes to die.

But just as with books in print and digital form, it’s not either/or, it’s and.

: Alex Wright argues, delightfully, the contrary problem: Discussing the web in terms of books limits the web:

I suppose it’s inevitable that writers will tend to view the Web through the filter of books and other printed artifacts; they seem to instinctively look at the Web as a better or worse kind of “book.” But that’s an awfully restrictive vision. As Walter J. Ong argued, electronic media in many ways resemble oral culture more closely than they do traditional literate culture (a topic I touched on briefly at the IA Summit). This is not to say that online media are by any means identical to oral cultures; rather, they exhibit a “secondary orality,” filtered through literacy, that nonetheless bears many hallmarks of older oral cultures. To understand what’s really going on, we need to widen our gaze beyond the traditional - and relatively recent - reference points of print culture to understand the role of deeper patterns rooted in our pre-literate past.

This is no easy task; we have such a collective cultural bias towards literacy that we tend to overlook the role of oral culture in shaping the way we communicate. But the reemergence of oral culture online, coupled with the rise of visual symbolism and spatial wayfinding, suggests whole ranges of experience that have little or nothing to do with books. This is a topic I’ve been probing in the book I’ve been working on (and about which I should have more to say in the next couple of months).

For now, the writerly crowd seems stuck in this mode of framing the Web exclusively in terms of its relationship to print. As long as the discussion remains mired in this kind of reductionism, I suspect we’re just going to keep seeing variations on the same tired themes, and the kind of reflexive confrontationalism that fails to allow for the complexity of what’s really happening. Not that it matters all that much; I imagine the Web will go on.

: Content to be Different says:

Jarvis speaks about the reverence we have for the book. We may indeed fetishise the object or the whole cultural practice from browsing the bookshop to curling up in bed to passing the book to a friend. But why should that be a problem. If the publishing industry can find a way to sell dead trees - I for one would still want to buy paper and ink as a gift for a new baby for instance - so be it. The issue is not the medium it is the economics.

Jarvis says: “We need to get over the book. And then we can reinvent it.”

We are moving into a media space where cultural practices lead developments rather than follow where Big Media strategies or economic models follows. It is not the book that needs reinventing, it is publishing. And that re-invention is happening and it is happening from below.

Imagine a media space where readers have the options to passively read or actively read/write. Imagine they can do that with the formats they choose, paper, screen, pda, phone whatever. Imagine a generation where they concentrate on the practices and experiences of reading/writing and discovering the best information and the most impactful content rather than the medium or the author….

: Eddie Awad condensed the discussion so far into a good gravy.

: John P. Mayer jumps off to call for electronic legal casebooks.

: Dinesh Tantri likens the issues in publishing with those in knowledge management.

The British Press Complaints Commission says regulating the internet won’t work.

“What chance is there of successfully applying a set of statutory rules to information transmitted online - where anyone can be a publisher and there is no spectrum scarcity? None,” he said, speaking at the launch of the PCC 2005 annual report.

“The only effective way of ensuring that online journalistic information is subject to certain standards is for those standards to be self-imposed.

“Improvements in technology and the proliferation of news sites make the case for self-regulation, because they expose traditional legal forms of media regulation - rooted in the days when the small number of television channels needed to be licensed - as hopelessly inflexible, and easily avoidable.

Can you tell our Congress and the FCC that, please?

A vote for net neutrality.

ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, Universal, Paramount, and Disney are suing Cablevision in an effort to stop them from offering a DVR in the cloud — that is, from recording and serving shows on-demand not on a TiVoesque device in the home but on a server that lets us — the viewers, customers, former prisoners of network schedules — watch what we paid for from anywhere in the house.

Twits and fools. It has to be a pretty dumb and dorky bunch that can get me to side with my cable company!

But rather than trying to fight our proven desire to watch what we want to watch when, how, and where we want, the networks should be embracing it. The smart network will see this as another way to get more shows recorded and thus watched. They will recognize that there is no real difference — only an attempt at a legal one — between us recording a show on your VCR (if you still have one) or DVR (the TiVoish thing) or on someone else’s server. In fact, by recording the shows up in the cable cloud, we’re less likely to be able to copy and distribute them. The networks might have argued that Cablevision was just recording everything and serving it up at will — which wouldn’t be a bad idea at all — but to get around that, the cable system is, quite inefficiently, recording the same show separately for every customer who wants to. The networks are arguing that this is competition with their on-demand strategy. They should see it as part of their strategy.

You’re just not going to be able to make a business anymore on the backs of stopping people from doing what they want to do. That was the old network model. In the new network model, you recognize that we’re in control and if you do that — if you embrace every way you can find to distribute and promote your shows — then you might survive. Yes, the world has turned upside down. Figure it out.

I constantly hear newspaper executives fret, “How am I going to get enough money to support my newsroom.” I did an interview about TV the other day and one of the questions was, “How are networks and producers going to get enough money to make the shows the make?”

In what business can you start your calculations with the bottom line you want to have: ‘I need to make this much money’? Doesn’t every sane business (that is new and hopeful or healthy and growing) start, instead, by saying, ‘This is my product, this is what customers are willing to pay in the marketplace, this is what it is worth, so that’s what I’ll make’?

That is the problem with threatened media businesses: They continue to concentrate on preserving their pasts, on the revenue they used to make as monopolies and megaliths in the age of big, and not on the products they create and the value they bring their customers in a new and competitive marketplace.

I wouldn’t bet stock on guys who look at their businesses from the wrong end.

Forbes’ Paul Maidment bashes the newspaper industry (uh-oh, more competition) following another moribund conference. But he gets it backwards.

If there was a change in print executives’ moods at the conference in Las Vegas, it was that a decade of consolidation and cost cutting to maintain what have been fat industry profit margins are giving way to talk of Internet publishing opportunities. Sigh. Earth to newspaper executives: Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have, in the meantime, made themselves into media companies that are bigger than any newspaper.

Even the mighty minds behind Google took several years to realize that they were a media company, not a tech company. But they and their fellow West Coasters have invented a new way of presenting journalism, through aggregation rather than creation. They have also invented a new way of consuming it, through search, and have found new expression to an age-old publishing truth–that if you can gather an audience, you can make money. In doing so, they have been ripping out the commercial heart of the newspaper industry, its classified ads business.

No, I say that’s mixed up. Search — namely, Google — and links — namely, blogs — send huge traffic to news sites. Without that audience and attention and branding, the old news sites’ online efforts would founder, taking the mother ships down with them.

In a distributed world, you want to be aggregated. If you’re not aggregated, you’re nowhere. (Not-quite-full disclosure: The news startup I’ve been working on promises to organize the world’s news.)

And Google did not kill the classifieds business. Neither did Craig. The advent of a new, distributed, edge-controlled medium that can put buyer and seller together directly, without the need for a centralized marketplace, is what did in classifieds.

Beware the French strategy of trying to avoid Google. That is like avoiding the newsstand.

The other day, I wrote about the idea that the BBC should go open-source and that, as a public trust, it should support rather than compete with media companies, giving them traffic when appropriate and the fruits of their experimentation. Ashley Highfield, director of new media and technology at the BBC, just gave a speech outlining some pieces of its relationship with other companies and more….

I welcomed Graf’s recommendation that we should implement a more systematic and comprehensive approach to linking from bbc.co.uk to external sites for example.

The power of taking audiences from a programme on BBC ONE to a site on bbc.co.uk and then out into cyberspace is huge – but I think we could go so much further. And we are trying: 9.5m users in March used BBC content syndicated to third party sites such as AOL and MSN; 23% of those users did not visit bbc.co.uk at all in March.

So far from being a 800 pound gorilla crushing the green shoots of plucky cyber-sowers, I believe we have the potential to have a significant and positive market impact….

But can we really deliver a genuine win-win-win for audiences, the BBC, and the commercial sector? And if so, how?

Firstly, we at the BBC must recognise that the internet is changing. It is becoming more translucent and porous – less silo’d. It’s becoming less centrally controlled – if it ever was.

Peer to peer and other technologies are shifting the power from the centre to the nodes at the edge of the network: you and me. This is a tough culture shift for an organisation used the certainties of the broadcast world.

Used to the idea of almost total control over what and how you watch, listen and consume, we must now learn to “loosen up and let go” as the Buddhist lama Surya Das puts it….

But we also believe our audience want much more as well. To find our content where they want it, whether within their favourite portal like MSN, their community like YouTube, or their environment like the Second Life virtual world website.

They want to contribute their content – this we know – but not necessarily always on our site, so we absolutely don’t want to become a MySpace or a Flickr or a Friends Reunited, we want to work with these players, to partner our relevant offerings with theirs.

In short we want to shift from being a gateway, to being a conduit, a channel for conveying content, and frequently neither the start nor the end of the journey….

I believe that how we deliver our programmes, the context, will be every bit as important as the content. Success in the web 2.0 world for all of us will come down to ‘discoverability’….

The ultimate aspiration is to bring all of these new initiatives together into a comprehensive re-think of what the BBC’s public service offering on the web should look like….

Not through expansionism but partnership – partnership with commercial companies and with our audience, achieving a balance between the need for some central control and coordination, and ‘letting go’.

By George, they’re getting it.