Story Review

I had the folly to upgrade to WordPress 2.8, so apologies if the blog is acting funny. If you absolutely must see the videos, they’re all on YouTube.

Last Saturday I went to an open meeting with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, and shot everything. He talked about the free encyclopedia, about his for-profit project Wikia and about web design, and that was followed by a lengthy but very interesting Q&A session.

One of the reasons why I’ve been so slow to post these is that I’ve been very busy. The other is that that was my first time shooting so much content with the Nokia N95 8GB and I made some rookie mistakes that cost me dearly in… err… post-production. There will be a follow-up post about the lessons I learnt from that experience, but for now I’ll simply put up the videos in case anybody else finds them interesting.

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I was asked a question: Do you think free content is a sustainable business model. And my answer was: Yes. I was surprised that everybody else in the chatroom felt otherwise.

In order for content to be sold, someone has to own it first. Nobody should own content and, indeed, nobody does.

It is in the best interest of all people that content should be free. Free access to information is instrumental for a healthy democratic society and drives progress forward. If people hadn’t had free access to books or to education, where would we be now?

In my experience people generally share this ideology. However, ideals are flimsy and businesses are about money.

But I think that from a business standpoint, too, content increasingly cannot be owned and those who still try are doomed. Let us take a look at the main content-creation industries.

In book publishing nobody owns the content. What is being sold and what authors and publishers make money from is the medium of the book (printed or e-version). Many have the illusion that they own the content they have authored or published but they don’t. For as soon as someone buys a book, they are free to share it with all their friends. Once content leaves the hands of the author/publisher, they no longer control it.

It’s the same story in the music industry, in film-making and in video games; and in those three sectors, as well as being able to share, users can also copy and distribute copies of the content, so creators and publishers have even less control.

Now, there are examples in all those industries of people and companies desperately trying to retain ownership over content. Books still carry ridiculous copyright notes, music and video companies are suing The Pirate Bay and game developers are busy competing who will come up with the most off-putting drm protection. But the industries at large have mostly got it right. They all sell you a medium: a book, a CD, a DVD, a download and, with the exclusions already noted, they let you share that with others. Yes, there may be legal speech on the booklet, but who has ever been convicted for sharing their game’s serial number with their buddies?

The news industry has long developed in a similar fashion. It controlled a certain medium, the hard copy, which it sold to people. The content itself has always been free, since if you bought a newspaper, everybody you would care to give it to could have read the news free. This medium is now waning and instead of thinking about how to replace it, newspapers are desperate to claim ownership over something they never had ownership over in the first place. This is not to say the other four industries mentioned are not doing the same thing. It’s just that none of them is really putting its very survival at stake for that cause. Even as they sue pirates, the record and film companies are dreaming up new content platforms they can control.

If the two factors — ideology and business logic — work together to enforce freedom of content, than it is inevitable. It may take a while, it may cost jobs and fortunes, it may be controversial and disputed, but in the end we will accommodate it.

I got an email from a reader today telling me she knew we had certain coverage but was unable to find a specific article. I looked it up and it turned out we hadn’t covered that story. So I gave it to a reporter and he wrote it up. I then wrote back to the reader and told her the article was now available. This was her response:

thank you very much! What a great service from you.

I tend to rant a lot, so I thought I shouldn’t miss this opportunity to brag a little. But also, that whole episode made me once again think about how much closer journalism is to servicing customers (readers) than to creating a product (content). And although writing stories on demand, as it were, may not be the best/the only/the most viable possible future for journalism, I am growing ever more convinced that custom(isable) niche solutions will be an important part of it.

Market-research firm Nielsen last week reported, and later backed up with fresh data, its findings about Twitter’s audience-retention rates, suggesting the microblogging tool may be facing a slump in user growth in the future.

Apparently, fewer people are returning to Twitter after they initially sign up than did return to Facebook or MySpace when those social networks had comparable user numbers.

It seems logical that the “bounce rate” for Twitter would be higher than that for the other two networks. After all Facebook and MySpace are pretty straightforward and people rarely have to wonder what they are all about or how they can be used. Twitter, on the other hand, is one of those things where finding new, and possibly unique, ways to use them is a substantial part of the fun. It makes sense that as it goes mainstream, the number of people who don’t “get it” and drop out of using it will increase.

Indeed, Twitter evangelists have long recognised the fact that a great deal of people will require some kind of a guide if they are to keep tweeting. How-tos abound.

Until recently those were compiled by twitterers who simply wanted to share what uses of Twitter they have found for themselves. Most posts had largely the same structure. You kick off by saying how you couldn’t get Twitter at first, but how you then started to find various applications for it and how you can’t now live without it. Then follows a list of the things you use it for. The focus is on “that’s how I use it, see if that works for you too”.

But as marketers and PRs have flocked to Twitter, influence-measuring tools have sprung up. Now those are busy people, they don’t have time to read blog posts on how Twitter can be used, let alone explore. Much better to have something as hard and measurable as influence to worry about. Sure enough, Twitter-analytics tools now give you advice on what you should do if you want to be a “top influencer” within your network.

Suddenly it is no longer about discovering Twitter; it is about participating in conversations (by @replies and #hashtags), adding “signal” to your tweets, etc.

I’m not saying those are bad things. But one of the best ways to learn stuff is by simply listening to what people who know more than you have to say. You can join a conversation by just shutting up and taking in others’ points of view. Just because you’ve chosen to be silent doesn’t mean that you need to improve your Twitter behaviour. So do yourself a favour: unless influence is really the thing you’re looking for, ignore those who tell you what you should do and just keep exploring what really works for you. Tweeting is fun; you don’t need someone to stress you out by telling you how much you suck at it.

The New York Times on Monday won five of the Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, and none of the other 9 went to an online-only news organisation.

On the one hand this seems to indicate that journalism, as practiced by traditional (monolith) media, is indeed in a very good shape and it is just the business side of things that is giving media companies trouble. On the other, it may mean that the Pulitzer Prizes have become irrelevant and fail to recognise great journalism of the new type.

The NYT has featured rather prominently in my reviews of great innovative storytelling and that has already prompted me to note that this firm’s financial problems are unlikely the result of poor or outdated journalism. But that is not by itself reason enough to confirm the Pulitzer Prizes as journalism’s topmost honour.

So the question is open: should we still seek to reinvent journalism, or has it already been reinvented and just needs the financing side tweaked a bit?

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Image by onesevenone.