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Merlin Mann on Doing Creative Work

Some sound advice for creative people…

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Inhabitat » 15 Year Old Invents Algae-Powered Energy System

Inhabitat » 15 Year Old Invents Algae-Powered Energy System.

“…don’t take my Kodachrome away.” « Flickr Blog

“They say all good things in life come to an end. Today we announced that Kodak will retire KODACHROME Film, concluding its 74-year run.”

via “…don’t take my Kodachrome away.” « Flickr Blog.

What’s in a newspaper…2

Quantative analysis of the content in a newspaper is pretty boring, it’s also a lot of work and the results aren’t spectacular. For the latecomers, this is a series of entries about what’s actually in a newspaper as distinct from what the newspapers try to tell you as a reader. As we will see, it isn’t all “news” and there are some interesting variations.

Just a quick note about definitions. My classification system is as follows -

• Journalism
• Graphics and photos
• Advertising
• Headlines

In turn the journalistic content is broken down into these categories -

• Journalist
• Editor
• Agency
• Photographer
• Cartoon

Naturally this is not an exact science, some newspapers don’t attribute certain content and the contribution of editors is subject to a certain amount of guesswork. As I said before these results are indicative rather than definitive.

The journalistic content results from the Financial Review in broad percentages look like this -

• Journalist – 62%
• Editor – 13%
• Photographer – 11%
• Agency – 11%
• Cartoon – 2%

The breakdown of contributor numbers look like this -

• Journalists – 46
• Photographers – 14
• Agency contributions – 11
• Editors and guest commentators – 9
• Cartoons – 3

Thrilling isn’t it? Wait till we get to the Telegraph!

DoD Training Manual: Protests are “Low-Level Terrorism” – Dennis Loo – Open Salon

Surprise!

DoD Training Manual: Protests are “Low-Level Terrorism” – Dennis Loo – Open Salon.

Goes well with this story

What’s in a newspaper?

So it occurred to me that with all the rhetoric currently floating around about the merits of newspapers and how vital they are to our western culture, it would be useful to actually do a bit of research. Now the relative merits of print versus online can be debated till the cows come in so instead of launching into another theoretical and philosophical essay I decided to deal with something a bit more concrete.

Perusing the petty cash tin I decided that I could afford to conduct a pretty basic analysis of a small cross section of the daily and weekend editions of Australia’s major newpapers. This isn’t groundbreaking stuff, just laborious measuring and counting of what is actually in the daily newspaper.

For the purpose of this exercise I intend to look at The Financial Review, The Australian, The Age, The Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald. Its not anything like a broad sample but you get that. If someone wants to defray my costs I will happily pull them all apart however this little sample is intended to be indicative rather than definitive so be warned.

The first cab of the rank is The Financial Review, a tabloid format yielding about 185 column centimeters (c.cm) with five columns across each of which is usually about 5cm. Monday’s edition had 56 pages.

For your three dollars this is what you get on the front page –

• Banner 37c.cm (20%)
• Ad 25 c.cm bottom (13%)
• Approximate “News” content 122.5c.cm (66%)

A breakdown of the news content for the front page goes like this -

• Photo 3*10c.cm ( 16%)
• Headlines (incl WSpace) 30c.cm (16%)
• News 5*4 + 2*10 + 5*4= 60 (32%)

The mathematical geniuses will quickly spot that the percentages don’t quite add up to 100% so I should qualify these results and all those that follow with a general rounding error of around 5%. When you look at all the white space in a newspaper that’s not a bad fudge figure.

As for the remaining 55 pages, the total breakdowns are something like -

• Journalism – 40%
• Graphics and photos – 37.5% *
• Advertising – 11%
• Headlines – 9%

Of course one thing that should be noted about the Fin Review is 14 out the 56 pages (25%) are completely dedicated to the absolutely vital business of reporting the latest stock market figures. I have chosen to throw those figures in with the Graphics/Photo category because it makes it easier to compare the Fin to other newspapers. If you treat the financial figures as a separate component the breakdown looks like this -

• Journalism – 40%
• Financial data – 23%
• Graphics and photos – 14%
• Advertising – 11%
• Headlines – 9%

Tomorrow I will have some rough numbers for journalists and other sources that are attributed in the Fin Review.

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Michael Geist – Harvard Study Finds Weaker Copyright Protection Has Benefited Society

“Moreover, the authors’ canvass the literature on the effects of file sharing on music sales, confirming that the “results are decidedly mixed.”"

A topical subject especially as the rhetoric coming from old media barons like Murdoch becomes more dogmatic. Copyright, like most laws, is firstly about protecting the privilege and position of the copyright owner. To make the claim that weak copyright laws reduce creativity or generally make societies less cultural as some would argue, misses the point that weakening copyright is symptomatic of a more diverse and healthy culture.

via Michael Geist – Harvard Study Finds Weaker Copyright Protection Has Benefited Society.

So what now?

First it was the net, then there were newsgroups. Does anyone remember newsgroups? What about IRC? Newsgroups, well they had …groups and IRC had channels, you could log in and post anonymously to you hearts content, lurking behind your “handle”. The original internet news may be slowly dying but have a look at any newsgroup server you can and it is still churning out millions of new posts every day endlessly storing and forwarding stuff around the internet. IRC once the cool thing has strangely lost its way but there is a big element of IRC in twitter.

The failure of news and IRC to prosper in the web2.0 world is simple, they were not commercially friendly and you needed a specific computer application with various setting to connect. The user difficulties were often resolved by ISP’s offering helpful howto pages but the big failure was commercial. Essentially, like email, these two internet applications put the onus for functionality onto the shoulders of the ISP. Both news and IRC became a service that ISP’s had to offer. Then the big money came and invested in faster networks so the acceptable face of the internet, webpages, could prosper. You can make money out of web pages, just look at Google, but how the hell would you monetise IRC or a plain text news message about someone’s political opinion?

Yet strangely the two pioneers of the web were immensely social places, restricted by narrow bandwidths real people engaged in real time in a variety of creative and amusing ways. Both news and IRC allowed you to link to web pages and a curious multilayered internet evolved where html web content was dissected plainly and without fanfare. Essentially the only tools available to users were words and punctuation. Email played its part and these three internet1.0 tools birthed lol’s and brb’s and of course the very friendly

However what both of these applications and, to a lesser extent email, did, was steal your time. Hours could be spent chatting online or posting and reposting opinions into a newsgroup of your choice, it all seemed like so much fun. A critical difference with today’s web2.0 tools is that most people who grew up with news and IRC conducted their alter egos in private space, separate from their day to day existence although clearly taking place in the real world.

So I stopped ircing a long time ago and my isp doesn’t even run a news server anymore. Now I have a facebook page and today I got a twitter account but as I sit here enjoying the beautiful winter sun I wonder whether or not I can really be bothered with investing more of my precious time online particularly when online is rapidly becoming just another marketing tool for vested interests. All the more concerning is that the one fundamental privilege web1.0 offered, anonymity, is no longer a given. My privacy on the net is gone and I must now be a good netizen. There’s my photo and my verified email address, oh and a webpage too. Sure I could fabricate it all but the whole point now is that your public net identity is also your private self.

And the time…do they have the afterlife wired as well?

Fairfax fights back

A strange thing happened the other day, I spent a saturday morning sitting in the sun reading a weekend newspaper. The news wasn’t particularly interesting, lets face it, the majority of the “news” appears everywhere anyway and its either alarm over swine flu or the usual bizarre fixation with the state of the economy, but buried in the SMH weekend edition was its News Review which yielded some more worthwhile reading.

Take for example the speculation around the leadership of the Australian Greens or the editorial about Global Warming. Perhaps the plight of New York as told by Anne Summers or the call to mend relations with India might grab your attention. Then there are the op-eds about The Chaser team or more reporting into the amount of homework young children do. Lots of good reading but two items really grabbed my attention.

The first one was buried elsewhere in the paper. It appears that Fairfax is going to resurrect the Nation Review. If they do succeed in bringing the old masthead back to life in a way that reflects its origins then I will be the first to applaud however it should be noted that the original Review was born in an era of strong left wing and anti-establishment sentiment and as such it was stridently independent.

Perhaps as an indication of motive, the second item that caught my eye was the strident defence of Senator Steve Fielding by Miranda Devine of page seven. Senator Fielding is a right wing independent who along with a handful of other senators constitute the balance of power in the Australia Senate. What that means is that he and his fellow BOP senators exert influence well beyond the size of their constituency. I have nothing against independent politicians, in fact party politics is in many ways detrimental to the political system but I do not personally agree with most of Senator Fielding’s positions.

Buried in MIranda’s article on the merits of Steve Fielding was an indirect attack by Miranda on two online publications that I found fascinating. First she took Crikey to task for their rather scathing portrayal of Fielding’s recent trip to the US as a “sick stunt”. According to Miranda Steve is only doing his job, diligently and seriously, and that he deserves praise for his work, not criticism and certainly not the sort dished out by a pathetic little online newsletter like Crikey. But MIranda’s obviously dislike for Crikey pales into insignificance compared with her attack on the New Maltilda which she described as “puerile and often bigoted”.

I think what is really obvious is that Fairfax have finally decided that online publications are a reality they need to deal with. Publications like Crikey and New Matilda are stealing their audience and with that audience goes a potential market so they must be put in their place. Of course once the Nation Review goes online then it will be possible for readers to visit a respectable and informed online site which will clearly stand head and shoulders above the rantings from the loony fringe dwellers like Crikey and The New Matilda.

The original ferrets would understand what Miranda clearly doesn’t, and that is, Steve Fielding gets a hard time because he deserves it. If journalists are to do more than pay lip service to the notion of the so-called fourth estate then it isn’t their job to defend politicians of any persuasion. End. Of. Story.

You can’t hide when you seek

Gordon Farrer offered this opinion the other day on the merits of Google.

It has become fashionable for the traditional media to bash Google. In various scenarios Google will ruin everything under the sun including all publishing as we know it, the movie industry and TV. And as we all know Google probably was complicit in the death of the music industry…

However contrary to expectations this is not a defence of Google, rather it is about some of the facts tucked away in Gordon’s opinion. What actually got me started on this was a fortnight or so of intensive Internet Explorer 8 advertising courtesy of the Age. If you are a regular reader of the Age you probably noticed it, invasive onscreen displays everywhere, in the banner, on the sides and in the big box on the left.

You might also have heard of Microsoft’s latest idea, wait for it, its BING, a new search engine supposedly bigger, better and friendlier than that nasty Google thing. Now Gordon didn’t directly refer to BING, he probably has some principles, but the coincidence of an anti Google opinion piece running at the same time as big Microsoft advertising splash and a launch by the evil empire of its counter to Google is just a little suspicious.

And in the tradition of all good Microsoft PR their was lots of FUD. Gordon asked the rhetorical question or two alluding to the scary Google monster hoarding its precious data, data about you the average computer user, and the vague risk of some “future abuse” of this information. Then there’s the obligatory quote from Rupert about Google “stealing” his content and so on. It all adds up to a scare campaign from a so-called technology editor who relegates concerns about the power of Microsoft to the dust bin of history.

Google might be making $20 billion a year from advertsing but that is still $5 billion less than Microsoft made in 2007 and Microsoft is the convicted monopolist. Think about that the next time you use the free service from Google on your Windows equipped Office powered pc.