The seven deadly sins of journalism companies

Submitted by yelvington on December 13, 2010 - 12:27pm

Newspaper industry analyst John Morton, who for the last couple of decades has been part and parcel of the self-destruction of the newspaper industry, has trotted out that tired old claim that newspapers are suffering because they failed to put up paywalls at the dawn of the Internet era.

He's actually making two arguments. One is often labeled "original sin" -- that the Internet pioneers at newspapers are guilty of leading those newspapers to their doom. I've debunked that repeatedly and it's ludicrous that it even comes up in this day and age. Early newspaper online efforts were, in fact, paid-content initiatives that were abandoned because the explosive growth of free Web competition quickly made them fail. I was there. I still have the T-shirt.

The other is often labeled the "digital vampire" argument -- that newspapers are being killed by news aggregators that are stealing their valuable content. The numbers simply don't bear that out (significant ad money and audience is not being shifted from local newspapers to vampirish aggregators), but there's nothing quite so attractive as a scapegoat.

But since we're talking about sin, I thought it might be useful to take a look at the classical Seven Deadly Sins and see how we fare.

They are:

Lust.

I thought surely this one would be easy to escape, but then came the frat boys who trashed the Tribune Company.

Gluttony.

There are many overbuilt temples, but Gannett's over-the-top corporate headquarters is egregious in an era when Gannett's reporters and editors are being laid off. We can shatter families and make them lose their homes, but let's be sure to hang onto our lake and our swans.

Greed.

Fish, barrel, smoking gun. Instead of focusing on how their companies might leverage new technologies to create awesome new services, "news" corporations have thought only about their current-operations top line, bottom line, and (shockingly large) margins. How do we "grow?" We take over our competitors, all with borrowed money, with -- of course -- the advice of certain industry analysts. We were warned not to do this, but when these companies should have been investing in the future, they instead bought more of the past. Results include the Knight-Ridder deal, ranked as the worst of 100 M&A bad-deal takeovers by Bloomberg.

Sloth.

No, we don't need to change. We don't need to reconstruct our sales forces, create smart incentives for digital sales, take the risky path, practice interactive journalism, try something new. I can't count the times I've been told "we're doing pretty well." That continued right up to the moment the economy collapsed.

Wrath.

What other word can you use for a newspaper company that sues a cat blogger? Suing people who cause you actual measurable economic harm is one thing; what the Las Vegas Review-Journal is doing is vindictive and ought to be embarrassing.

Envy.

There's certainly plenty of it going around. Everybody envies Google, of course; instead of understanding why and how Google creates value, some have resorted to filing lawsuits against it.

Pride.

Ah, yes. There will always be newspapers because the public will always need newspapers. We are the only business protected under the Constitution. Professional journalism has standards and those bloggers in pajamas are just parasites. Our classified ads are Bona Fide and those other sites are just junk. What goes before a fall?

Five sad reasons American press isn't outraged

Submitted by yelvington on December 12, 2010 - 12:24pm

Over the last couple of weeks a parade of non-journalists has approached me, offline and online, wanting to talk about the Wikileaks mess. Most of the discussion has boiled down to this, which I'm quoting from a note:

Why isn't the American press screaming at the top of its lungs about this. How can we let the Joe Lieberman's of the world lead this discussion. If the press doesn't take a stand here we are doomed. There will be no reason to have a "press" in this country. Politicians can simply post their "press releases" themselves.

I can think of some reasons. They are sad ones.

  1. Julian Assange isn't a "journalist," and Wikileaks isn't a "journalism organization." Many journalists are horrified by the implications of letting just anybody practice journalism. I've actually heard People Who Ought To Know Better -- journalists, educators, former editors of major newspapers -- call for certification and, in effect, the licensing of Real Journalists. It's as if freedom of the press is a privilege of professionals, not a human right of some mere computer nerd.
  2. The "liberal media" meme is bogus, a giant mind fake. The American press is an infotainment/advertising industry owned by giant corporations and run, on the whole, but rich white men for the financial benefit of themselves and investors. The "liberal media" complaint has long been the refuge of political weasels (remember Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew), but its latter-day power comes from the media itself, manipulated by ultra-rich power brokers like Rupert Murdoch.
  3. Corporations don't like to get caught up in controversy -- especially not these days, when media companies are all in big economic trouble. Reporting about controversy generates an audience. Being in the controversy alienates large parts of the potential audience. It's bad business. (Fox News is not a counterargument. To understand when and how partisanship becomes economically advantageous, read Jay Hamilton's All the News That's Fit to Sell.)
  4. Local media doesn't find this local issue. Our press has, as I predicted years ago, separated out into distinct local and national layers. Most local newspapers today give only a passing nod to nonlocal news (and as a result, AP gets 80% of its revenues elsewhere). Don't go looking for your local newspaper to be worrying about foreign-policy fraud. Not their jobs. Our national mass media scene now is whittled down to a couple of rage-exploitation channels on cable, the New York Times, Murdoch's kleptocracy-supporting Wall Street Journal, and a pathetic free Gannett paper that everybody steps on when walking out of their hotel room in the morning. The network news organizations are hollow shells speaking to dying audiences, fearful of accelerating their own demise by taking a stand.
  5. The concept of "property" has been extended to embrace information, supporting the claim that the information from secret cables is "stolen property." It used to be that telling a lie about a person or a corporation could get you into trouble. Now governments and corporations can claim injury when someone states a fact, and, stunningly, act to enforce silence without any judicial oversight. Now, if you can't tell a lie and you can't state a fact, what else is there? (Note that these restrictions do not apply to those in power -- as shown by the cables, Washington is free to lie, and insiders strategically leak classified information whenever it's politically advantageous.)

There are many people who are legitimately troubled by the release of secret information and there is plenty of cause to question the judgment of the Wikileaks editors who are posting this stuff. Don't go around expecting anyone to have clean hands. I keep coming back to a couple of basic principles. One is that the purpose of government is to protect the rights of the people. The other is that our first freedom is the right to speak freely the truth. If our government turns its back on that freedom, then none of the others will matter. But I'm not writing newspaper editorials or running a newsroom these days.

Why ChromeOS is relevant in the middle of a tablet revolution

Submitted by yelvington on December 10, 2010 - 5:38pm

Google announced this week that ChromeOS finally ... well, it's still not shipping. But there is light at the end of the tunnel, evaluation units are being shipped to lots of people, and both Acer and Samsung plan to pop ChromeOS netbooks in a couple of months.

Some people are impressed. Others are questioning the very existence of ChromeOS: Why would anybody want a computer that's totally tied to network access? How is this relevant in the middle of a tablet revolution?

It's actually very relevant. I'm not predicting the success or failure of ChromeOS as a consumer product, but I am predicting that it's (yet another) game-changer. Understanding it may require that you give up some things that you "know" about computers.

Here's why.

  1. It's not tied to the Internet (not the way you think). The coming wave of applications will be Web-centric but will work offline in the event you can't connect to wifi or mobile broadband. To understand how this is possible, see http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/offline.html and
    http://dev.w3.org/html5/webstorage/ and http://www.html5rocks.com/tutorials/offline/storage/ and
    http://code.google.com/chrome/apps/ for details. Google actually had its Google Docs online word-processor fairly functional offline a couple of years ago (I used it to edit documents on an airliner), but threw all of that work out to embrace the new standards. Watch what happens in the next three months.
  2. It is Internet-centric (in a good way). Your "stuff" is always "there." You won't accidentally leave an important file out of reach at work, at home, or at school. Everything is synchronized -- your bookmarks, the place you left off reading Great Expectations last night, your purchased apps, your music. If you use Chrome browser today, or a Kindle, or Netflix, you should have been given a small taste of what this means. See http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=165139 for a view of how Chrome's sync works.
  3. It breaks the suffocating grip of the Wintel axis. The indications are that Samsung's and Acer's netbooks will run Intel chips, but they equally well could run the same power-saving ARM chips as your smartphone, or some chipset yet to be invented. The Linux core runs on everything. ChromeOS is portable. And applications are written in HTML5/Javascript. Watch what the Chinese do with this -- with or without Google's help.
  4. It's a tablet solution, too. ChromeOS apps will run equally well on the iPad, Android tablets, the coming Blackberry PlayBook, and your old Windows and MacOS computers. All you need is a modern browser. In fact, Blackberry has announced it's discouraging the development of proprietary applications, favoring HTML5. Think about what this means. Everything works everywhere.
  5. It's blazingly fast to boot up. This raises the competitive bar for everybody.
  6. A mountain of annoyances has vanished overnight. Computers can be pure hell for anyone who doesn't enjoy constantly having to crack technical puzzles. The idea behind ChromeOS is to power an appliance that Just Works, requires no configuration, no drivers, no software updates (they're automagic), and suffers from no viruses. About that ....
  7. It's secure by design. Linux is inherently more secure than the alternatives, but ChromeOS goes well beyond that, trusting no one. This is a Hugely Good Thing, and another case of raising the competitive bar. We've all suffered for years from viruses and spam botnets enabled by poor security in the old desktop world.

I haven't had my hands on Google's Cr-48 evaluation unit, but I've kept tabs on Hexxeh's open ChromiumOS, which in turn tracks Google's development path, and of course I've been using Chrome as my Web browser almost exclusively for quite some time.

I don't feel an urge to abandon my desktop environment (I run Ubuntu) but I have to admit that I really only use two non-Web applications with any frequency. One is Thunderbird, which arguably is easily replaced with Gmail. The other is Gedit, a programmer's text editor, and most people don't write code.

Maybe cheap, secure, fast, safe, easy to use netbooks will succeed alongside tablets. Maybe keyboards will go the way of the dodo. I don't think it makes a whole lot of difference, because the work that's gone into ChromeOS isn't wasted. This is a game-changer regardless of which team you play for.

It's not a paywall

Submitted by yelvington on December 5, 2010 - 5:04pm

A year ago I wrote a blog post titled Thinking about a paywall? Read this first. If you haven't read it, please do so now, as it's a prerequisite for this one.

Friday, the Augusta Chronicle announced that it's implementing a metered-access system using the Press+ system.

It works as I described, providing tools that let the publisher identify high-volume users and target them with a request that they pay something.

Let me explain what it is not.

It's not a paywall, as some have mischaracterized it.

It doesn't cut the site off from the Internet.

It doesn't interfere with social link sharing.

It doesn't discourage sampling. Casual users and new visitors won't even know that it's there.

It's not based on arrogant bellowing about how users "should" pay, or ridiculous claims that the free Internet is ending.

It's not doomed like the Times paywall.

It's not a feeble attempt to milk the cash cow dry.

And it's not driven by belief, but rather by some quantitative analysis leading to some projections that should be tested in the marketplace rather than debated by new-media pundits.

It also isn't perfect, being based on cookies, but it's good enough.

An advertising-only business model has a dangerous characteristic that any farmer would recognize: If conditions shift against it, you're screwed. That's clearly happened as the recession that began in 2007 drove the ad business into the ground.

Anyone who's been in the media business long enough eventually learns that some revenue streams are more affected by business cycles than others. Reader revenue is relatively less affected, and looking for ways to blend it into the mix is a healthy move. It's important to pursue other sources of revenue as well, and that's being done. Polycultures are inherently more stable.

Four Drupal tools that solve 90 percent of your sitebuilding challenges

Submitted by yelvington on November 25, 2010 - 11:04am

There are two ways to solve problems when building a website. One is to find a specific tool for each problem. The other is to find and thoroughly understand how to use just a few very powerful, very general tools.

When building a site using Drupal, you can go either route ("there's a module for that").

I prefer the second option, because it lets you invent instead of just employ solutions, so here is a list of four tools that can solve 90 percent of your problems.

  1. CCK ("Content Construction Kit"). In seconds you can create a new type of content with special fields. They could be text fields, URLs, references to other pieces of content or to users. They could be geocoding references used to generate maps. They could be images or videos. They could be values to generate an embedded chart. Want to make a directory? No coding required.
  2. Views. Once you have some content, you'll want to display lists, make data feeds, and so forth. That's what Views does. It makes headline/teaser lists, bulleted lists, tables, grids, XML feeds, complete pages, embeddable components, search interfaces, even Javascript widgets. There's even a bulk-operations tool that lets you invent new administrative tools. No coding is required.
  3. Panels. Once you have content and some list display components, you're going to want to mix and match them on pages with complicated layouts. Panels lets you do that. Replace that blog-like page with something more refined.
  4. Your brain. Ain't nothing like it. The human brain can see abstractions. Once you master CCK, Views and Panels, you'll discover you've been doing it wrong: instead of 99 special-purpose Views, create three or four with variant displays, and learn to pass arguments to refine their behavior.

There are lots of other toys in the toybox, f course, and if you just grabbed the top dozen modules at http://drupal.org/project/modules you'd be well served. But I'd start with these four, because when the question turns to "how can I ...?" the answer in 9 cases out of 10 is "CCK, Views, Panels, and your noodle."

Baby duck syndrome

Submitted by yelvington on October 31, 2010 - 6:36pm

Screenshot: Text-mode Citadel interface, still working after all these years

 

I haven't heard the term "baby duck syndrome" in years. Back when I first started using online services -- in 1985,  before some of you were born -- I heard it a lot in conversations among programmers working on a system that I used a lot. It's a reference to a P.D. Eastman children's book. Although the baby bird in the book wasn't a duck, it's the same idea: the hatchling assumes that the first creature it sees must be its mother, and tries to become attached to it.

Applied to computers, it means we get attached to the first system we use and judge all others in that context. If you cut your teeth on Windows, you might find Mac OS X or Ubuntu Linux to be confusing, even though both of them arguably are easier to use. But it's not limited to usability. It's an entire set of expectations.

It also applies outside of computer-human interfaces. When something new arrives, we try to make it into something old.

When the Web came along, most newspaper people tried to make Web newspapers, and in the process missed revolution after revolution: portals, search, local search, and social media. Presented with a blank slate in the form of tablet computing, they're doing it all again. I could round up everybody in the newspaper industry who understands the implications of HTML5's geolocation services and fit them into one car. It might be a stretch limo and we might be crowded,  but I'll bet we could do it.

Sometimes the baby duck syndrome is useful, if you chance upon the right "mother."

I discovered the online world through software called Citadel that encouraged conversation. I got so interested in it that I wound up running my own dialup bulletin board system and even created a Citadel newsletter.

When the Internet opened up to commercial use nearly a decade later, I looked at it as a huge leap forward in terms of conversational opportunity -- not just as a one-way publishing platform along the lines of print and broadcasting. The pre-Web online service we built at the Star Tribune in 1994 featured integrated discussion forums and community group publishing.

As to why this didn't enable me to invent Facebook, I have no excuse.

The exact software that I used in running my 1980s-era bulletin board is gone, but a multiuser clone is still around. Today, Citadel is not just a bulletin board but has grown into an email, groupware, calendaring and scheduling tool with interfaces to the Web, special client software, and standard office tools. The old text interface from the days of 300-baud modems is still around, and I was surprised to find my fingers remember most of the commands. My current baby duck fixation is on Thunderbird, which works fine with it.

So my weekend has disappeared into moving my home email system onto software that I first discovered when I had a full head of hair. I've acquired a "new" server -- well, newer than the crusty antique that I've been using for my blog for about eight years now. My blog is moved to the new system and seems to be working OK. I still have more than 15,000 photos on Middle Daughter's gallery to migrate and all sorts of loose ends to attend to. Everything should be a lot faster now. 

 

A mixed review for a no-name Chinese Android tablet

Submitted by yelvington on October 7, 2010 - 8:39pm

For some time I've been convinced they're coming: tablets and netbooks in the $100 range.

Not quite. But I finally got tired of waiting and ordered a $150 Android tablet direct from Guangdong: the iMito iM7. At 7 inches, it's exactly half the size of an iPad and, coincidentally, almost exactly the size of a 15-year-old Apple Newton MessagePad (pictured here).

Here's a preliminary review and account of my experience so far.iMito iM7 with a 15-year-old Apple Newton

The source: LightInTheBox.com, which appears to be a global drop-shipper of various Chinese products ranging from bridesmaid's dresses to plastic dog poop, with some tech toys thrown in the mix. They have a very slick website and seem to be a respectable company, with prices only slightly higher than you can find on some less substantial-looking Chinese sites.  

I placed my order Monday, Sept. 27 and paid $151.99 for the tablet, $26.15 for "expedited" shipping and $1.99 for insurance, for a total of $180.13 via PayPal.

"Expedited" means after it's shipped; the order languished for a couple of days before a Shenzhen warehouse identified as "sunyogbo" gave it to DHL air express. I was able to track its weekend journey from Shenzhen to Hong Kong to Cincinnati to Atlanta. It arrived at my house the following Monday. I wasn't home, so it had to be redelivered Tuesday.

I posted photos of the unboxing ritual to my Flickr account.

In the shipping box I found a product box branded "Konseptus model K02 mini pc" and a U.S. plug adaptor. Apparently Konseptus is a Turkish importer's brand and these tablets get repackaged in many forms. There's no branding on the actual tablet and the splash screen announces it as an iMito iM7.

The iMito apparently began life as a Windows CE tablet around last March -- a doomed software platform wanted by pretty much nobody. Some WinCE versions are still available on the market under various brands. Android entered the picture later in the year.

Most of the currently available Chinese tablets are running Android 1.6 or even 1.5. On the iMito, Android 2.1-update1 (Eclair) is installed, running on a Linux 2.6.29 kernel. This brings most of the functionality benefits of a current release level but not Froyo's performance gains.  There's no place to download updates and Cyanogen doesn't support this odd Chinese hardware, so it's stuck at 2.1 for the foreseeable future.

The one-page "manual" claims it comes with office software, but none was included. However, it did include the Android Market software -- apparently banned for non-phone devices in the United States (I blame Google's sale of its soul to the devils at Verizon). This is important because, although there are some alternative Android marketplaces and rumors that Amazon will start one, Google's collection is the only one that really matters at this point.

I made quick use of the Market to install some free programs, including Kindle, which works fine, a better Wifi scanner and a couple of filesystem browsers.

The hardware is a mixed bag of good and not so good:

CPU: 700 mHz Telechips 8902. This is a moderately fast ARM-11 with a bunch of video extensions including built-in codecs. It's not as fast as the ARM Cortex derivative in the iPad, but then we're talking$150 here, not $500-$800.
RAM: 256MB -- the specs claim the system can accommodate twice that but there's no apparent way to expand it.
Storage: 2MB with most of that taken up by the operating system. There's a MicroSD slot, where I stuck an 8-gig flash card before installing any software.
Screen: 800x600, 7 inches diagonal, bright and readable. 
Accelerometer: Automatically switches between portrait and landscape mode, depending on how you hold it. 

Where things start falling apart:

Touch technology: Resistive touchscreen that's less sensitive than the Nokia I bought over three years ago. Some operations, including typing and even simple scrolling, can be maddening. There's a stylus (how very 1999) but it doesn't really help. The predictive spelling system made it even worse, changing words to all sorts of odd references apparently grabbed from my Google contacts. I turned it off. 

I expected the touchscreen problem, as it's commonly reported across all the cheap Chinese tablets. I wouldn't recommend them for general consumer use until capacitive screens are common. 

There's no multitouch. 

Webcam: Bug: It occasionally captures stills with bizarre video artifacts. User-facing, it's not convenient for photography. I guess you could make silent films of yourself.

No microphone: Seriously. There's a little hole in the front for a microphone, but there's no mike. WTF? A webcam and no microphone? I've used my Nokia N800 for calling home via Skype from Belgium, Spain, Germany, India and China. Without a microphone, I'll never do the same with the iMito.

No Bluetooth: I can't use my Blackberry for 3G Internet access, as I can with my Linux laptop.

No GPS: You won't be using this to drive around. But once you're connected to a wifi network, Google's spooky-good Wifi location database takes over and does a pretty good job of pinpointing your location. My house is dead-on. This works with Google Maps as well as the Web browser.

USB: The "OTG" hub is supposed to work either as a master or as a slave. It works fine as a slave, but doesn't seem to do anything as a master, using the provided cable.

Power supply: It came with a European power plug -- two round pins -- and, in the shipping box, a clunky adaptor for the two-blade standard used in the United States (and, strangely, in China). This works but it's ridiculously clumsy. I probably have an old Nokia power supply in a shoebox somewhere that will substitute once I find it.

I have no idea whether the micro-HDMI port works, as I don't have a cable to plug it into the TV.

Performance overfall seems to be a split verdict -- some things are noticeably faster than my old Nokia, which had about half the horsepower, but not everything.

My Nokia ran native code (Gnome-based HIldon interface, implemented in C on top of Linux) while Android runs a Java-like virtual machine on top of the native system. Some core components bypass that layer, and I suspect the Web browser is one of those components.

The Android YouTube application plays very nice quality video (native, not Flash), but half the videos I played halted after a minute or two and reported "unable to play."

I can't tell if this is a software error or just poor handling of my crappy Knology cable modem's habit of taking a nap for 30 seconds every five minutes. When I watch Hulu on my laptop, the Flash player buffers a huge quantity of data, avoiding most of the stupid network tricks.

The 7-inch screen size at 800 pixels of resolution is small enough that apps designed for phones don't look bad at all. Websites that detect browsers automatically switch you to the mobile version. If you use a regular website, it' likely that the page is designed for a 1040-pixel display, so the browser shrinks it to fit. This works fine in landscape mode. In portrait display, the page is not eye-friendly.

I installed a little app I created with Appcelerator Titanium. You don't have to jailbreak an Android device to install your own applications.

This is a tablet, not a phone. Android is really designed for a phone, so you'll run across some orphaned phone references in the user interface (the nonexistent cellular carrier is identified as "El Telco Loco." ) You may within the next year see really nice Android tablets for $150 that come with a 3G service contract. Do the math before you decide they're a bargain.

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