Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

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.

Larry King said his heterosexuality was tempted by his Late Show bubble bath paling with Jim Carrey. King said in his blog.

The tub was slippery.  The scene was romantic…so romantic that I almost — almost, lost my heterosexuality.  And to tell you the truth, I think Jim felt the same way.  The lighting was perfect.  The Champagne wasn’t bad either.  The bubbles were very…bubbly.  All it lacked was music.  Sinatra would have been nice.

Don’t know that I believe that Carrey was as tempted – if he has any yearnings for same sex-sex those yearnings were certainly quashed, at least temporarily, by this creepy encounter.

I am not sure if this episode is evidence that gay-teasing is still acceptable in mainstream humor or that people have progressed enough that King can joke around about a bit of a man crush on the svelte Carrey.

There was a bit of a protester traffic jam at city hall this past Wednesday. Just as a coalition of Bronx criminal justice activists were packing up their protest gear another group appeared on the scene waiting anxiously to scream their chants and invectives on Bloomberg’s tidy steps.

Before the second group really announced themselves a woman from the Bronx group explained.

“They are AIDS housing activists. I don’t understand what they are protesting about. People with AIDS get plenty of housing,” she said.

The coalition, as it turned out, was protesting Bloomberg’s proposed cuts to the Scatter Site II program which provides people living with AIDS housing and therapy. The contract for Scatter Site II is expiring this coming June and the Mayor has signaled that he might not renew it.

Many of those in the program would be moved into unsupervised housing that would not include any kind of counseling and supervision, according to Kenneth Whitmore a housing developer specialist with Floating Hospital.

“Remember the housing crisis in the eighties?” Whitmore said, if the city makes cuts to the Scatter Site II program “it would be the same all over again.”

But some policy experts say that the programs are poorly run. Housing Works Director of New York Policy Kristin Goodwin said in a recent article in AIDS Issues updates that Scatter Site II’s initial assessments of the clients are poorly done and people are placed in housing who may really need more serious treatment.

“The problems with Scatter Site II are structural,” Goodwin said.

For Alberto Cardona the protests are to maintain a program that he says saved his life. He was homeless with HIV when he enrolled in the program.

“Once I became homeless none of my friends were there for me” Cardona said.

“[Scatter Site II] allowed me to come in. I was without clothes on my back, they provided me with shelter…they immediately transformed me into a working individual.”

By Sergey Kadinsky & Joel Schectman

The public has now come out against the American car manufacters saying they have been sluggish in innovating their classic American guzzlers.

But a survey by the Japanese Trade Union Confederation showed more than a third of the nation’s companies have laid off workers or taken other steps to reduce labor costs in the past three months to cope with the global economic crisis. Nearly 40 percent of manufacturers are expected to lay off more temporary workers.

At the same time, much like their American counterparts, Japanese unions continue to defend wage increases, the Japanese Automobile Workers’ Union is demanding at least ¥1,000-a-month as a salary adjustment, while other unions are demanding even more.

Since 1986, Japanese law has made it easier for companies to hire temporary workers, who are largely non-union. Both Japanese trade union confederations, Rengo and UI Zensen, are working to enlist these workers, making substantial gains last year in recruiting part-time and non-regular workers into the union ranks, judging by a 12% increase in 2007.

Among Japanese Auto Workers, membership declined from a peak of 830,000 in 1994; to the 2004 membership of 699,000. Today, JAW is looking for further growth through part-time and temporary autoworkers. Their strategy is clearly forward-looking as major automakers recently announced that they would slash the number of contingent employees due to slow sales.

Toyota reports that its number of full-time workers will fall from 9,200 early this year to 3,000 by the end of next March. Mitsubishi Motors Corp. says it will not renew 1,100 contract staff from now until next March. Mazda Motor Corp. is eliminating 1,300 temporary jobs.

People often cite the $70+ per hour cost of American labor as the reason behind the Big Three’s financial losses, but it should be noted that in Japan, the pensions are paid by the state. As a result, labor costs are much lower  for Japanese companies

Even Chris Sands of the conservative Hudson Institute says that a lot of the auto industry’s problems come from having to vest pensions, which often forces them to shift money from working capital. This is a problem not shared by the Japanese auto industry, that has state pension. In the past, American companies  would borrow money to pay for this gap, and they’ve always been able to pay it back. But with the markets frozen this year, they didn’t have this option. That’s why they’ve come begging to Congress.

The Republic National Convention posted a video online this Saturday alleging that Obama might not be speaking with complete candor on his relationship to the Blagojevich scandal. The video titled “Questions Remain” is a bit reminiscent of a 1950’s newsreel which is appropriate for a piece of work so explicitly Mccarthy-like.

Cast in all black and white the piece attempts to show Obama’s connection to the governor because Obama helped with Blagojevich’s campaign in 2006. I wonder if the guilt-by-association trick will work better this time around than during the election. But this case is certainly an even more bizarre attempt at a connection – what kind of headline do the Republicans hope to make:
OBAMA HELPED FELLOW STATE DEMOCRAT TO CAMPAIGN FOR REELECTION

Pretty unimpressive stuff.

Mccain is distancing himself from the attack ad (aren’t those over?!) – perhaps uncoincidentally during an interview when he said he might not support a Palin presidential bid. The whole venomous attack thing is something that has hurt Mccain several times. Bush used it on him in 2000 and his own attempts to play those hands might have cost him this past election.

Which makes me rather wonder what the RNC is up to on this. What will de-legitimizing and incoming president during a time of grave crisis do for them? Is it just a reflexive blow from punchers that have trained to hard to miss a small opening?

I would like to see some good analysis on this folks.

With an army of tasks mounting an all out siege, I have decided to seek out productivity tools. Is it to late to avert disaster? Like coming to temple only once a year on Yom Kippur I try find remedy for my sins of omission far after the fact.

Google launched last week a Task application within Gmail. Its essentially  a to-do list with some handy functions like a scheduler a tool that can pull tasks directly from emails.

I am trying to combine this system with David Allen’s Getting Thing’s Done methods which has a massive, nearly cultish, following.

Allen’s system is based around that all the “stuff” in our life – be it classes or bills to pay or dates to go on – need to be organized in essentially same manner.

The trick to the system is a monk-like commitment to a mundane method of handling incoming tasks:

All things to do – both big and small get collected; you then process the tasks – and figure out the next immediate tasks associated with them. Immediate action items are described in full concrete detail – a step that GTD users say prevents procrastination.

There is a once a week review ritual where outstanding tasks are reprocessed and either dismissed or set into action.

A whole nerdy culture has evolved around GTD – with productivity blogs and even associated gear – think specials folders and notebooks.

Below you can see one guy showing off his filing system and desk organization – he apparently doesn’t have the whole meet women thing on his task list.

But maybe it is worth being as lonely as this man for the bit of calm that comes with knowing that things are getting done.

If  Obama loses the election next week Sarah Sliverman would like to be able to blame just this one more thing on the Jews. She theorizes that Florida’s victory for Bush came down to a few “Bubby’s” and “Zedies” wandering out of the nearly monolithic Jewish voting block and going Republican.  She goes on to urge that younger Jews make a trip down to Florida to convince their grandparents to do the right thing this time around.

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

But according to a recent Gallup poll if calamity falls on election day Sarah won’t be able to blame Jewish grandparents. As it turns out younger Jews are more likely to vote Mccain with only 19% of Jews over 55 planning to vote Republican as compared with 29% of Jews 18 to 34 hailing Pailin.

Don't blame the Bubbys! Younger Jews are more likely to be conservative.

And if you’ve spent any time in the Jewish community lately this will ring true. Younger Jews feel less attachment to the left-leaning  and progressive sentiments that were carried in by their refugees grandparents and great-grantparents who came fleeing oppression. As a more fully assimilated demographic, younger Jews do not have as strong an identification with the underdogs and have greater ideological lattitude to pick a political philosophy for reasons beyond their Jewishness.

The Zeides aren't the Jews stealing the vote.

I decided several weeks ago that I needed some new habit. With a life that’s been in continuous motion for several years I felt I wanted some kind of anchoring activity that would mark my days with a bit of the mundane, a bit of the regular. I think I decided on running because it was not something I would need to do in a group and the equipment is probably the simplest of any hobby.

I also knew that if I kept up my running that I would soon see improvement and in this point in my life I very much want to believe that incremental progress is possible. There are so many causes and fights that you can get involved in, so many self-improvement rituals that you can partake of, that make it seem that the basic arcs of life are immovable. Running seemed to me a kind of faith in the possibility that things can go forward.

It is hard for me to find an athletic type to lookup to. I do not see myself in the models of Men’s Health or Runner but this past week I found that my favorite author, Haruki Murakami, is an avid runner and in fact wrote his newest book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, on the subject of his marathon training.

The Japanese fabulist author of the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka by the Shore wrote in a New Yorker article this past summer that the habit of running builds and uses the same discipline that is required of a writer.

Murakami chose writing as a career change, and much like I hope to do, he started the running as part of regiment that allowed him to build his craft over time

“So like eating, sleeping, housework, and writing, running was incorporated into my daily routine”

The run that I do