Story Review

In a blogpost from Tuesday, Scott Karp of Publish2 said:

The publishing business has always been about packaging content. Newspapers. Magazines. Newsletters

Errr… No. At least not all. Actually, it’s just a tiny minority of them that have always been about packaging content. The rest have long crossed over to a business model that had nothing to do with content and was all about selling people to advertisers and advertisements to people.

That is why newspapers are finding it hard to charge for content: they haven’t done it for so long they’ve forgotten how it’s done.

There are some noteable examples of publishers who are selling content. For instance, you have to buy games TM if you want to read it: there is no free online version. It is hard to judge how successful they are, since publisher Imagine Publishing does not release financial results, but the firm has been snatching up assets (including the Linux User & Developer magazine and website and car-magazine publisher Total 911 and its website) while others have been desperate to sell bits of their business in order to survive.

This does not mean that any newspaper would flourish if they shut down their websites or make web content more expensive than the print product (like the Newport Daily News has done). Since games TM is in the business of selling content, it makes it its job to produce top-notch quality content that people will want to pay for. But this is not the case with the majority of newspapers.

Publishers want to charge for content and newspaper publishers specifically want to charge for news. However, they are new to this business and yet many of them still behave like they know it all. It’s time they got told otherwise.

If WolframAlpha sounds familiar but you’re not quite sure what it was, it is one of those new search engines touted to replace Google. Whether it will or not is the subject of another post entirely, for now let’s just focus on the main difference between the two algorithms (and please excuse the generalisations).

When you ask Google a question, it gives you the answers of potentially millions of people each of whom has some relevant information on the topic but not all of the relevant information. When you ask WolframAlpha a question, it gives you the potential answer of just one person who is immensely well informed and has the capacity to process all the relevant information. Google gives you the wisdom of the crowds and its answers represent the collective knowledge of a large group of people. WolframAlpha, which uses pre-categorised libraries of human knowledge, tells you how each individual person would be likely to answer your question, given the same information WolframAlpha has.

So now I’ve set up the stage for the main attraction. This is WolframAlpha’s definition of journalism:

I take this to be the likely answer to the question of what journalism is if you asked people who do not regularly think about it. In my experience, that is also often the answer from people who do regularly think about what journalism is. Even if they do not say it directly and even if they would not admit it when confronted, most people equate journalism with newspapers. Not TV, not radio, not news agencies.

So far, so not out of the ordinary. Using a narrow term for a much broader concept is something we do all the time. My problem in this case is that it spills over. For a year now I have been listening about a supposed crisis in journalism. There is no crisis in journalism. Journalism is doing very well from what I’m seeing. The business of making and selling newspapers is in crisis for reasons that have nothing to do with journalism. I’m not saying people should not be concerned about that crisis too, but the longer we continue to equate journalism with newspapers, the longer it will continue to be a hurdle for all other sorts of journalistic endeavour. Universities should focus on teaching journalism separately from teaching newspaper-making. Companies should focus on making journalism rather than making newspapers. It will be better for both journalists and newspapers.

In the previous post (which seems ages ago) I posted all the footage I shot with my phone during a talk by Wikipedia-founder Jimmy Wales in Sofia and said I’d follow up with a few, hopefully useful, tips about what to do and what not to do when shooting video with a Nokia N95 8GB. So here you are, maybe somebody will find that useful.

One thing that may cause trouble is that if somebody rings you while you’re shooting, the camera automatically stops so that you can take the call. If it happens in the wrong moment, you can miss shooting something valuable, so be warned.

From a distance, the N95’s camera captures the audio that goes with the action even better than the voice recorder. However, if you are shooting people and want to capture their expressions, you’ll need to get near to the person. Otherwise, they’ll look like poor J Wales in one of my videos. And, whereas what he is saying is much more interesting than his facial expressions, his blurred face hurts watching the videos.

Keep it short. Hit stop and then start recording again as often as possible. The N95 produces video clips in mp4 format, which is fine with YouTube. However, if you shoot for half an hour without pause, your video’s length will exceed YouTube’s 10 min cap and you’ll have to split the clip. That brings headaches of its own.

If your videos get too long, you’ll need an mp4 splitter. Finding one that is free is not easy (if you know of one, please let me know in the comments), and eventually I had to settle for a stripped-off free version of a paid-for application called Boilsoft Video Splitter. It worked well and fast, but the free version will only let you split your video in segments up to 2 min long. That, in turn, may be too short for you. In the case of J Wales’s talk, 2 min were not enough for him to wrap up any of the topics he talked about. Thus, after having split the video into 2 min bits, I needed to join the bits into 10 min clips. Which, of course, required an mp4 joiner. (Boilsoft Video Splitter does what it name suggests and not the reverse.)

Finding a free mp4 joiner was even harder than finding a free mp4 splitter. In fact, I have yet to see one. I opted for the alternative route of converting the mp4 files into avi files and then joining those together. Unlike free mp4 joiners, free avi joiners are very easy to find. I used one called Virtual Dub, which is actually a much more powerful application than simply an avi joiner. It also let me recompress the video and make the files smaller.

But Virtual Dub does not support mp4, so I had to first convert the mp4 files into avi files. For that, I used a web-based free tool called Media-Convert.

The whole splitting, converting and joining of files took up a lot of time and effort and could have been easily saved if only I’d pressed the stop button more often. So if there is one thing I’m going to take away from the experience it’s to shoot shorter videos rather than feature-length ones.

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Original image by Andrew Currie.

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.

All the videos are also on YouTube.

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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.