Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

…fun with final cut…

I want to throw down my gauntlet in the future of journalism debate and I will do so making a falsifiable statement (a rarity in these discussions): Journalism will not become profitable again until the industry figures out how to charge people for online content.

Recently I went to yet another hyperbolic panel discussions on internet journalism. The CEO of Slate.com Jacob Weisberg spoke in triumphant tones of how the time for coexistence between print and online was over now that the internet guys had bigger “armies”. It sounded a bit like a declaration of war from some newly empowered ethnic nationalist movement whose glee over a fresh shipment of arms stripped away any facade of caution or diplomacy. This guy was ready to march on Rome and he didn’t mind saying so.

Some of his hot air was sucked out when an audience member asked him, “Is Slate.com profitable?”

His enfeebled response drifted from something about lawyers to an awkward silence.

And that is the point – behind all the rhetoric and triumphalism it is very hard to think of any free ad-based content that has proven profitable. Google – the king maker of adbased revenue – has not been able to monetize there  most user-centric web 2.0, journalism for the people, ethno-everything magic tool: youtube.

And folks if Google can’t create big ad based profits on user generated content that ought to be telling us something.

The theory is that people are unwilling to pay for content now that anyone can publish stuff online. There is no scarcity, according to this reasoning and people will not pay for something that is not scarce. You or I can put up a movie review according to this argument and it can compete with the best.

This is wrong.

Scarcity of news is actually increasing not decreasing. Its true that anyone can publish online for free – and there are certainly more opinion makers than ever before – but that does not mean that you can do reporting for free and we actually are seeing a shrinking core of new coverage.

The media adopted a false economy online. When one newspaper decided to offer free ad-based content  they all had to jump in or face being left behind. For awhile the public adapted to this free, unsustainable model and the newspapers and magazines – bloated from decades of plenty – could afford to try out this new idea of giving it all away. It failed.

Ad revenues were never able to deliver up the goods. All the sources of news that we have relied on for decades are going under. And they are not being replaced. A million  opinion writers blogging on a million other opinion writers cannot fulfill the one vital function of journalism: to gather news.

We have  gotten into thinking that this is a service we can get for free because we jumped on board with the news media’s failing experiment in something for nothing over the past eight years. And once a certain amount of news media and consumers decided to invest in this experiment the rest had to. But now it is coming to an end.

The audience will not come to paying for content out of a love for the product but out of a neccesity. The failure of the free model is going to leave us with very few quality media outlets. That means there will once again be scarcity.

When quality, free content dwindles past a certain point people will once again be willing to pay for news, just as they always were before these past eight years of illusion. The industry, for its part will need to work out a pricing structure that leverages the ease of payment and low cost of publication that online offers.

Lots of people thought that noone would ever buy music again but Itunes found  price structure that worked – as of June 2008 the store has sold 5 billion songs. The trick was knowing to do it 99 cents at a time.

On Monday, for the first time in a long time, I watched NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams from start to finish at its scheduled time, complete with commercials.

I’m turned off by most advertising to begin with, but I think that the lack of interest among young people in network news can at least partially be attributed to the ads. (more…)

Your grandma’s eggnog, it ain’t.

Coquito, the Puerto Rican version whose ‘kick’ depends on the cojones of its maker, drew hundreds of party-goers this Saturday to el Museo del Barrio in East Harlem.  The seventh annual coquito-tasting contest featured more than 30 entries from as nearby as 110th and Third Avenue, to as far away as the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania.  What everyone shared though was a love of Boricua heritage and an undeniable desire to keep a family Christmas tradition alive.

“Coquito is about a cultural connection,” said Debbie Quiñones, who flitted here and there all evening, trying to make sure her ‘extended family’ was all right.  She hosted the first tasting party in her apartment.  When the gatherings became too large, three years ago, she chatted up a welcoming neighbor: el Museo.

But, “It’s growing bigger than what we can handle!” el Museo’s director of public programs, Gonzalo Casals said onstage, sharing a laugh with the overflow crowd.

Well before the pouring, yelling, jostling and tasting began, it was clear that coquito (literally, small coconut, in Spanish) was so much more than the yummiest drink, ever.

“I’m the only one in my family who makes coquito,” said Enid Rodriquez, who was participating in the contest for the first time.  “Throughout the years, the tradition has gotten lost in the family and I was the one who picked it up.”

Iris Mendez, bottle #10 and also a first-timer, debuted her mother’s recipe.  “I hope I get lucky tonight,” she said, “because there’s lots of competition here.”

Martha Laureano-Perez, bottle #21, entered the recipe of her late husband, Richie Perez, a well-known human rights activist who died in 2004. “We were married for 23 years and every Christmas we made coquito together.”

This year’s winner, a husband and wife team who concocted bottle #15, accepted with a nod to their New York roots: Hunts Point, the Lower East Side and of course, Harlem.

After the tasting, everyone rocked their hips to the transplanted African rhythms of Segunda Quimbamba and head-nodded as poet, Emanuel Xavier, essentialized what it was and is, to be Nuyorican. (In his “Nueva York” poem, below, listen carefully for, “papitos vendiendo coquitos mientras brown-skinned project mothers crossed themselves every morning before heading off to the factories or going off to do the compras…”)

The museum event ended around 8:30pm with little to no coquito left.  No doubt, the after-party duró toda la noche.

From Labor Day through early December, armies of parents spread out across the city, combing the admissions offices of private schools and public talented and gifted programs. According to the Department of Education, more than 16,000 students applied to public gifted kindergarten and first grade programs alone last year. And the competition is surprisingly stiff, with less than one seat for every ten applicants last year. In recent years a demographic bulge of children born after 9/11, has meant that times are even tougher for would-be kindergarteners and the parents.

Monique Walker, a mother of two, who recently returned to the city has applied to eleven private schools for her son.

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The competition, raft of tests, and the Byzantine application process amount to a trial by fire that leaves many parents overwhelmed.

For Serge Avery a public high school teacher and father of two young children, testing presented an additional problem. In testing his son he found himself doing something he wouldn’t otherwise agree with.

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Despite how foreign this world can look to onlookers and its inhabitants, most parents express a desire to simply give their children a good education–though the process has some asking just where it ends.

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But many parents are concerned that having to go to such lengths for something as simple as a good education means that many children will be educationally left out in the cold.

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And while these parents spend an uncertain  application season getting their children into the best public and private schools to city has to offer, what is certain is that many more children will have to settle for less.

Last week citizens around the globe celebrations gathered to celebrate the 60^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

UN photo by H'rina DeTroy

From Pretoria to Paris panels, film showings, lectures and public ceremonies commemorated the signing of the historic document that enshrined theories of universal rights famously established in the French and American Revolutions.

At an event at the UN, and sponsored by the High Commissioner for Human Rights, ten short films were shown, each touching on one of the rights guaranteed in the Declaration. Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako’s film is a mediation on dignity and justice. Finding working people going about their business in the market, in their cars, on their way from place to place, he asks them the film’s eponymous question: “C’est Quoi La Dignite?”

His respondents’ stares are arresting. Some look at the viewer with confusion,  others with defiance. “Why are you asking me,”one man demands. Though the lens of his camera, Sissako conveys the answer he seeks in the faces. This, he suggests, is what dignity looks like.

It was remarkable, and a not so subtle statement, of the UNHCHR’s concerns that among the international selection 2 of the 10 short films were from Israel/Palestine,  both addressing the absurdity of the Palestinian predicament. In A Boy, A Wall, A Donkey by Palestinian filmmaker  Hany Abu-Assad three young boys attempt to make a movie   using the only technology available: first a neighbor’s intercom, and later the surveillance cameras mounted on the Israel’s “security barrier.” When members of the IDF approach the boys in a speeding military vehicle, the boys do not run, but ask only “Where’s the tape?”

Israeli filmmakers Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret take a different approach. In their film What About Me? a magical realist take on the subject of crossing borders in the occupied territories, a Palestinian businessman is refused entry to Israel with his load of bananas, while his talking donkey is waived ahead. Like Sissako’s film, What About Me was selected to address the issues of dignity and justice in the  declaration.

Still by H'rina Detroy from the film What About Me?

Together the ten films offered a beautifully articulation of the strivings of a document that has shaped the way we think about ourselves and each other.

1975 South Bronx nativity (image from NYT.com)

Folk artist Joseph Sciorra constructed this unique nativity scene, set in the South Bronx, circa 1975.

My very first post on this blog was about photos of the Bronx during that time.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve spoken with a few people – a bar owner, an unemployed 30-something, a pastor – who are worrying about the near future of the city in this recession.

Maybe a look at this scene (click here for some details) is a good reminder of what the Bronx has overcome and what it will hopefully never have to face again.

So last week, Google released maps and lists charting everything from online users’ most frequent questions on a national scale to specifically New York City’s search penchant. The rest of the story is pretty boring and doesn’t reveal much in the way of novelty (national users searched “American Idol”-related phrases while NYC-ers searched obscure architects and physicists), though, and the idea that Google is tracking our searches on a mass basis is pretty much old news at this point.

What I find infinitely more amusing and interesting is the fact that Google tracks trends, beyond the flu trends , to the personal web history – on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis. If you’re signed into Gmail, Google tracks and displays this information via lists and bar charts. Your most frequent search terms, your frequency of activity this past year, how many searches you conduct per week on average, what day of the week you search most frequently, and what time of day you use Google search most often. You can view the results overall, over the past 7 days, the last 30 days and the last year.

Overall, my search activity spikes on Wednesdays with a pretty symmetrical upside-down bell curve over the course of the week. My search times peak between noon and 5 p.m.. My search traffic was practically non-existent from January through April when I was working full-time… but then steadily rose through late Spring and Summer months before skyrocketing in October (probably from the Jewish holidays and boredom/procrastination).

Screenshot of Google Trends web history bar charts

Over the last 7 days, my search activity spiked on Sundays and I averaged a high of around 14 searches between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.
The #1 phrase entered through Google was the Interactive Fundamentals blog. The top 5 all had to do with word game and free book searches. Although this week, “women’s health mag” and “non-FDA approved drugs” squeezed in at #4 and #5, respectively.

The ready availability of all this information can be a boon and a bane. Fascinating statistical log or Big Brother watching over you? The way I see it, it’s not really watching over me since the info is just one of millions of data sets like it in existence and for the most part, is used only to fill in data sets for the national search rankings. To the part of me that is still skeptical and ever-weary, though, it is somewhat unsettling, seeing all that information collected there and knowing it’s stored somewhere else, either a few miles away or much further.

“An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/Soul clap its hands and sing” – W.B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

“Voris, you’re like an old man” (paraphrase) – More People Than I Can Count

I have friends who would rather undergo dental work without anaesthetic than have a discussion of what images flashed across the back of their eyelids the night previous.  If you count yourself a member of this cohort, I advise you to read no further. (more…)

Wyclef Jean, Lauryn Hill and Pras

The lights over the Bowery Poetry Club went dim, casting the stage into blackness save for the brief silhouettes cast by camera flashes. Raw sounding interview clips of hard to distinguish voices emerged from the speakers, muffling the screech of a single microphone’s feedback and hushing the crowd.

When the clips ended, the room fell silent. A lone male voice rang out.

“Hey yo one, two, three!”

Cheers erupted.

“The crew is called refugee ee ees! And if you come fa tes the rap style ee, stop the violence and just bring it on, wi ild!”

With that, the house lights came up to reveal emcee Nyle standing atop a speaker at the front of stage left, his right hand holding the to his mouth, his left waving above the crowd. The band burst into sound, and the Fugees Tribute was officially underway.

For over an hour on the night of December 4th, Nyle and an assembled collection of extraordinary young talent from around New York City performed hit after Fugees hit, as well as songs from individual Fugees members Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean and Pras.

The performers played to a more than capacity crowd.

“The Bowery Poetry club has a standing room occupancy of 175 people,” said Nyle, full name Nyle Emerson, a student at NYU’s Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music. “We had 278 people come in throughout the course of the night. So, throughout the entire night, it was beyond occupancy.”

Christine Dominguez, who played the role of Wyclef Jean during the song “Gone ‘Til November,” said the audience was the most memorable part of the show.

“It was a connection with the audience — I’ve never had something like that before,” said Dominguez, a singer/songwriter now residing in the Bronx. “There were so many people, and we were all on the same page.”

The audience was comprised of a mix of ages and demographics, something that speaks to the lasting success of a group who was on the music scene for only a few short years.

The Fugees compiled just one noteworthy album as a group, the 1996 release The Score, but it was one of the most acclaimed hip-hop/pop albums of the decade. The Score was a meld of hip-hop, reggae, R&B, rock and soul, and it earned the group a Grammy for Best Rap Album. Two of its biggest hits were remakes of older songs: Roberta Flack’s 1973 song “Killing Me Softly” and Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry.”

Despite the success of The Score (it sold more than 17 million copies, making it the highest selling rap album to that point), The Fugees disbanded less than a year later, as the members chose to focus on their solo careers, to varying levels of success.

Nonetheless, as the crowd at the Bowery Poetry Club demonstrated, The Fugees sound still manages to remain relevant.

“The Fugees man, that’s real music,” said Rahj, a New York City vocalist who performed “No Woman, No Cry” at the show.

The success of the tribute show, though, had everything to do with the artists.

Nyle, who put on a successful Tribe Called Quest tribute at the same venue in October and was subsequently invited back, thought a Fugees tribute would enable him to optimize the unique talent of many local musicians.

“I thought about the different singers and different people I know, and The Fugees just really seemed perfect,” Nyle said.

In the true manner of The Fugees themselves, each performer took a verse or a song of the group’s members and reinterpreted it to the beat and melody of a live band.

The result was a thematic talent show of all that is good about the now in music. For spine tingling moments, it made you think that perhaps this was one of those shows, a crossroads of talent that will drive the future of the industry, a show that in 15 years will have you saying, “I was there the night that…”

When asked if he felt the same way, if he too thought the show was one of those moments, Nyle said this:

“Do I think that? I can’t. I just hope it. I hope that we can all look back on that. Because we all have the talent. We definitely all have the talent to be on that level. But, really, it’s just a roll of the dice.”

To hear more from the performers, visit their MySpace pages:

Nyle
Christine Dominguez
Chaz Kangas
Elle Varner
Genesis Be
Rahj

*Special thanks to Nick Loomis for his editorial assistance