Spencer Critchley

Technology

The News Business Is Broken in the Digital Age – If You’re an “ee”, Not If You’re an “er”

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Via Tim O’Reilly’s blog I come across San Francisco Chronicle publisher Phil Bronstein, predicting layoffs and saying the news business “is broken, and no one knows how to fix it… And if any other paper says they do, they’re lying.”

Meanwhile, according to a Zogby Poll I find in the Financial Times, “Newspaper editors are overwhelmingly optimistic about their businesses, despite uncertainty about future business models, according to a new global poll of newsroom attitudes to the rapidly changing industry.”

Which is it? Both, I’d say – it depends on whether you’re an “er” or an “ee”.

As with other media businesses, digital technology is a big opportunity for employers, and a big threat for employees. Mostly because the former won’t be paying nearly as many of the latter.

Dave Winer, at his scripting.com) blog, has a provocative prediction of the future of a news business based on citizen journalism:

…journalism should become a required course, one or two semesters for every graduate. Why?… In the future, every educated person will be a journalist, as today we are all travel agents and stock brokers. The reporters have been acting as middlemen… As with all middlemen, something is lost in translation, an inefficiency is added.

You could say the same about music, film and any other business that can be disintermediated digitally.

Among the technorati, the default response to this process seems to be optimism. I can see why (and I share some of it): we’re experiencing a massive wave of democratization at the same time as a huge increase in productivity. Especially for the many geeks who have a libertarian streak, this goes straight to the sweet tooth. If you complain that the “inefficiencies” being eliminated are people, the quick response is the “buggywhip maker” argument: Why should we hold back progress and prosperity to protect outmoded jobs?

But it seems to me that democratization and gains in productivity, because they’re so dramatic, are blinding optimists to the effects of a third phenomenon: massive transfers of risk.

All businesses are essentially risk models: Managers devise ways to package risk in a way that they can sell for a profit. If I’m running a news business, my risk model used to be that I was taking a lot of upfront risk in paying reporters, editors and others to find and prepare the news, which I could resell to advertisers, subscribers and news stand customers. But if I can now get citizen journalists to contribute content for free, I’m transferring my upfront risk to them. My business’s risk model is now very different. I aggregate free content, use it as the seed of a community, and sell advertisers the community.

So what’s the problem? For one, the exploitation inherent in offloading risk onto a crowd of individuals, no one of whom is fully equipped to take it on, and few of whom are compensated for it. Photo journalist Sion Touhig wrote a powerful piece on the human costs in The Register a while back. Sample quote:

We’re continually being told the Internet empowers the individual. But speaking as an individual creative worker myself, I’d argue that all this Utopian revolution has achieved so far in my sector is to disempower individuals, strengthen the hand of multinational businesses, and decrease the pool of information available to audiences. All things that the technology utopians say they wanted to avoid.

And I think there’s a potential cost to all of us, regardless of whether our jobs are affected. That’s because the risk traditionally taken on by news organizations includes the potentially huge liability involved in performing an essential service to democracy: investigative reporting. By “investigative” I don’t mean gossip & gotchas or clip jobs, I mean developing sources, interviewing experts and poring through references, files and databases.

Citizen journalists can probably learn how to do this (and now that I think of it, that’s another reason for the geek appeal of disintermediation: the endless seductiveness of learning new stuff!). But how many actually will do it, or even should? As a citizen journalist, do you really want to take on a story on the scale of Iran-Contra, Enron or Plamegate? Can you muster the thousands of hours, and face the gigantic legal – or even physical – risks?

Certainly not as a lone citizen journalist. That risk that’s floating around loose still needs to be packaged in some way, or else it just floats off over the horizon. And then we don’t have investigative journalism any more. Some “ers” may welcome that, too. But I believe it’s a big problem for all of us, since we are all “ees” at one time or another. So if we’re going to open up journalism by sharing access to publication, I think we need to start looking for some new mechanism for sharing the risk.

Strip Away The Production, Reveal The Great Song Within

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I’ve been listening to Moments From This Theater: Live, a wonderful album by the great Memphis/Muscle Shoals songwriters Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham. It’s just the two of them, accompanying themselves on acoustic guitar and electric piano, recorded at 1998 shows in Ireland and England. They play classics including “Dark End Of The Street”, “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man”, and “I’m Your Puppet”, which have been recorded by, among many others, The Box Tops, Aretha Franklin and Percy Sledge.

I’m struck once again by how stripping away production often reveals the greatness of the song within. For example, “I’m Your Puppet”. I’d never really thought much about that song; for me it was just a piece of the oldies background—obviously catchy and well crafted, but fluffy.

You probably know it from recordings by James and Bobby Purify or The Box Tops, if only from elevators and shopping malls. Those artists were great singers (the Box Tops’ lead singer was Alex Chilton), but the pop production of their versions obscures the emotion in the song by exaggerating it. Listen to Penn and Oldham’s bare bones version – I’ve put it on an iTunes playlist:

Stripping Away Production

What I had assumed was pop cotton candy turns out to be heart-breaking.

Listening to Penn and Oldham reminded me of an NPR interview I heard a while ago with Richard Thompson, in which he sang “Oops, I Did It Again”, better known in its version by Britney Spears. Thompson wasn’t being ironic. As he said in the interview, he’s not a Britney Spears fan, but he thinks “Oops, I Did It Again” is a very good song. He praised its “mediaeval harmonies”, for one thing, which are up his alley, as an expert on the British folk tradition (he recorded it on his album 1000 Years Of Popular Music). You can hear the interview and find a link to the full performance of the song at npr.org:

Richard Thompson Interview & Performance

I agree that it’s a good song, and I predict that the day will come when critics will be letting us know that it’s OK to think so. That’ll be once time has made Britney’s marketing onslaught seem less threatening—it’ll no doubt come to seem quaint, the way yesterday’s pop star-machinery always does. To elaborate on Thompson’s point about harmony, I admire the way the writers (Max Martin and Rami) express guilt in the verses and then sound triumphant about the same subject in the choruses. In the verses they explore dark, chromatic lines in the harmonic minor scale1, and then they burst into the relative major key in the chorus.

Here’s an excerpt from the verse, in a simple piano arrangement to highlight the melody and harmony. This is in A minor, which is Thompson’s key (Britney sings it in C# minor). The chords here are Am, E, Am, F, E. Notice how the move from F to E sounds Moorish (think of flamenco music). The lyrics are “I think I did it again/I made you believe we were more than just friends”, which carry a more complex resonance when sung by an adult:

And here’s an excerpt from the chorus. After repeating the Am, E, Am pattern of the verse, it goes to a G, which takes us out of the key. G is the dominant chord in the key of C major2. And the next chord we go to is a C, here with a suspended 4th, which sounds even more exultant. The lyrics at this point are “Oops, you think I’m in love/I’m sent from above/I’m not that innocent.” The chords sequence is Am, E, Am, G, Csus4, C, E:

There’s a lot more to be said about the song, but I’ll resist the temptation to go on and on. Let me just suggest listening again to something that you may have dismissed as junk only because of the way it was packaged.

I’d also point out the difference in sales between Penn and Oldham’s versions of their songs and the versions recorded by pop stars, and between Richard Thompson’s “Oops” and Britney Spears’ “Oops”. That difference is an index of the “value add” contributed by the pop stardom industry. By this I don’t just mean marketing hype: I think a pop performance is a multi-dimensional event, involving image, drama, sex, ritual and more, and it’s expensive to put on. The recording industry is shrinking year by year, its revenues declining after decades of expansion. If we’re moving towards a recommendation and reputation-based market, it may give a pretty good indication of the smaller scale of individual successes in the such a market. Recorded music, by itself, we don’t seem to value very highly.

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1. The A harmonic minor scale (the key Richard Thompson sings “Oops” in) includes the notes A, B, C, D, E, F and G#:

The chords in a key are built using only notes from that key, by stacking them in thirds. The chords based on A harmonic minor are: Am, B half-diminished, C, Dm, E(7), F and G#dim.

2. The dominant chord is based on the fifth note of the scale. In the key of C, that’s G. A dominant chord sounds like it wants to go to the tonic chord, which is based on the first note of the scale. Here the G chord leads us to a C, the tonic chord in the key of C. At the end of the chorus we end up on an E chord. That’s outside of the key of C, and is in fact the dominant chord in the key of A minor, leading us back to the home key for the next verse. When a chord outside of the key appears in a song, it’s often leading to a new key.

Digital Politics

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From my O’Reilly blog:

I’ve been doing more and more work in politics since the ’04 election (communications consulting and web production). I got involved at first out of a sense of civic obligation–and because my wife told me to “stop ranting and go volunteer”. I expected to dread a lot of what I’d encounter, figuring politics is where the worst people you knew in high school went. You know, the manipulative weasels fascinated by power. But I’ve been surprised by how deeply interesting and satisfying the experience has been so far, and by how many people I’ve met who are still motivated by service.

The intersection of technology and politics is one of the most fascinating areas of all, so I think I’ll be writing about it some.

A couple of recent items I’ve come across highlight the subject’s currency. From Tim O’Reilly’s report of a Clay Shirky talk at ETech:

Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn’t realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools. We need to have conversations about the explicit goals of what it is that we’re supporting and what we are trying to do, because that conversation matters. Because we have short-term goals and the cliff-face of annoyance comes in quickly when we let users talk to each other. But we also need to get it right in the long term because society needs us to get it right. I think having the language to talk about this is the right place to start.

And from a New York Times op-ed titled Exporting Censorship, by Xeni Jardin of boingboing:

One of our most laudable national goals is the export of free speech and free information, yet American companies are selling censorship. While some advocates of technology rights have proposed consumer boycotts and Congressional action to pressure these firms into responsible conduct, a good first step would be adding filtering technologies to the United States Munitions List, an index of products for which exporters have to file papers with the State Department. While this won’t end such sales, it will bring them to light and give the public and lawmakers a better basis on which to consider stronger steps.

If American companies are already obligated to disclose the sale of bombs and guns to repressive regimes, why not censorware?

Why not indeed. Increasingly wars will be fought via electrons over networks, not bullets over land.

My Tips From An E-Musician Article On Podcasting

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Electronic Musican recently ran a comprehensive article on podcasting, written by David Battino. It includes some tips from me. A lot of what has stuck with me about communication over the years I first learned as a freelance writer-broadcaster for the Canadian Broacasting Corporation:

“I think the most important thing is a strong focus-an angle,” he replied. “The focus is a simple, active, emotionally compelling statement of what this story is about and why it matters to people. ‘Water pollution’ is not a good focus. But, ‘When you wash your car, you’re sending toxic chemicals into Monterey Bay,’ is.”

Another skill podcasters can learn from radio is how to write for the ear rather than the eye, Critchley says…

More at emusician.com.

Are We In A Productivity Crisis?

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This post also appears in my O’Reilly blog.

In my series on downloads I looked at a couple of scenarios, based on traditional CD sales and iTunes sales, that indicated that the people who make music may end up making less money from downloads than they used to from CDs, even though CDs were not a great business to start with. Digital efficiencies have the effect of driving down prices, and the end of the trend may be music that’s worth next to nothing on a per unit basis. One possible outcome: Aggregators of that nearly free content may very well be able to make money, but small labels, and artists, may not.

My scenarios represented very small data samples. But they may be examples of a much bigger trend: a productivity crisis, one caused not by too little productivity, but by too much.

In the past, increases in productivity tended to be locally disruptive but broadly beneficial, a trade-off described by economist Joseph Schumpeter as Creative Destruction. When more efficient work produces more output per worker, some workers lose their jobs. But the overall increase in wealth creates more prosperity for everyone (assuming a roughly free and fair market), and more jobs. Those new jobs often required higher skills, but if displaced workers got training in those skills, they could end up earning higher wages. These days, telecommunications, computerized logistics and efficient transporation allow jobs to be shipped to lower-wage countries. Further down the line, automation eventually moves those jobs from low-wage humans to robots. On balance, though, if workers are being retrained for higher wage jobs, everyone may benefit.

But there may be a new problem, arising from the fact that with technology, each round of improved productivity causes the next round to come sooner. Because most of human history has been a story of scarcity, it’s our habit to assume that more and cheaper is always better. But as we see in many systems, a phenomenon that is benign when it happens at one rate can become threatening at a faster rate.

This kind of worry about the anti-human threat of technology is not new–when trains first started running, some feared that humans might be killed simply by moving at that speed. And so far, human adaptability has always triumphed, with life generally getting better for most people. For all the stresses of modern life, the average resident of the developed world is the healthiest, longest-lived, most prosperous person in the history of humanity.

But it seems to me there’s a natural limit to how fast people can learn how to do new jobs. If productivity improvements keep eliminating more jobs faster, the curve of productivity improvement will cross the curve of educational improvement, and that intersection could very well be a crisis point. It may be one we’ve already reached.

Much social tension in the US over recent decades has been a result of the divergence between the minimum educational level required by the average job and the level actually attained by a particular group of workers. In the 60’s, many African Americans, equipped with grade school educations from second rate schools, were left behind as factories moved to cheaper labor markets or became automated. African American men’s lost access to relatively well paid manufacturing jobs contributed to the decline of the cities, the break-down of families and a rise in crime. Later, whites with high school diplomas started to find that they couldn’t get good jobs, and we saw the rise of white supremacists and militias. Now many college graduates are struggling to find good jobs.

Meanwhile, the US economy has grown smartly, fueled by these technology-driven productivity gains. But as the overall economy has grown, we’ve seen a widening gap between the rich and everyone else: It looks like the value of an elite education (or really good social connections) has skyrocketed, while people below that level are being commoditized. Unemployment is low, but the unemployment percentage doesn’t reflect the many people who have given up looking for a job, the many people who are employed in low wage jobs.

Where does this lead? As more and more work can be done by machines, what do we do with the idled humans who can’t adapt fast enough? Pay them for not working, ending up with welfare for just about everyone? Or will we discover dramatically improved ways to educate people? Even if we do make that discovery, there will still be IQ limits to contend with–do people deserve to be poor just because they’re not brilliant? Or will people evolve in the direction of the very technology that poses the challenge? Ray Kurzweil argues just that in his new book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology: He believes that in the not too distant future we will merge with brilliantly intelligent computers and become, in effect, a new species.