Baby Bigmouth
Somewhat later than advertised, Sophie Marshall was born this evening – 11lbs 3oz, and 17 days overdue. Mother and baby are amazing. I’m going to bed.
For a week.
Archive for October, 2007
The Onion: even better than the real thing?
While other newspapers desperately add gardening sections, ask readers to share their favorite bratwurst recipes, or throw their staffers to ravenous packs of bloggers for online question-and-answer sessions, The Onion has focused on reporting the news. The fake news, sure, but still the news. It doesn’t ask readers to post their comments at the end of stories, allow them to rate stories on a scale of one to five, or encourage citizen-satire. It makes no effort to convince readers that it really does understand their needs and exists only to serve them. The Onion’s journalists concentrate on writing stories and then getting them out there in a variety of formats, and this relatively old-fashioned approach to newspapering has been tremendously successful.
An interesting Reason magazine article via MetaFilter, where MeFite Tiresias isn’t impressed by interactive journalism:
A part of the problem, for me, has been the newsmedia’s endless parade of “What Do You Think?”s — the slew of worthless interactive content, the endless ratings, and, dear God, the comments, the comments on fucking everything…. they just turn even the most serious subjects into mere entertainment for a certain kind of person who may not know too much about a subject, but now has the ability to argue passionately about it.
Which is a pretty good description of some interactive sites, particularly those newspapers whose comments sections are usually populated by idiots, bigots and bores. *cough*Evening Times!*cough*
In the current issue of NUJ house magazine The Journalist, Victor Noir writes about viewer interaction:
I gather from a BBC source that half the images they get are of people’s cats…
Cats.
Another who worked at a BBC regional studio says that viewers were asked to send in pictures illustrating the weather. What did they get? Snaps of bedraggled-looking moggies in the rain.
It’s the future of news!
It wouldn’t be so bad if the desire for interactivity at all costs didn’t infect pretty much everything. A good example of what I mean is last week’s Location Location Location: Best and Worst Live programme (hey, I’m waiting for baby Bigmouth to come along, I’m bored…). It’s a fairly lightweight bit of TV – various stats (crime, average salaries, percentage on sickness benefit, that sort of thing) compiled into a league table of the best and worst places to live in the UK. And it was interactive, so when a particular place was mentioned, the viewers were exhorted to get in touch and have their say. And they said one of two things:
MY TOWN DOESN’T SUCK YOU SUCK
Or:
MY TOWN SUCKS
Which meant a 20-minute programme lasted for three and a half days (although to be fair, some of that was phone-in-scandal-induced panic of the “If you’re watching this on video and you’re too stupid to realise that this is no longer live, don’t call! Don’t text! PLEASE, IN THE NAME OF GOD DON’T GET IN TOUCH!” variety, which amused me immensely.)
Tiresias again:
There’s nothing really wrong with it, you know, it’s just shooting the shit and we all do it, but now it’s not really just shooting the shit. It’s being published and legimitized, and this middle of the road, well-meaning but ill-informed drivel is pretty much setting the tone of the debate.
Superb headline
From the Daily Mail:
Lesbian foot specialist struck off after posing in bondage gear, and saying ‘f*** Easter’ in front of nun
Popjustice tells it like it is
I love Popjustice, especially when it publishes posts like this one. On the monstrosity that is “Samanda”:
The thing is, this is not a pop single and the two women fronting it are not pop singers. This is not a pop career. This is an example of a fairly shrewd management team building a fleetingly lucrative brand around two people, using pop music – and the pop charts – to raise profileand increase the money they can make from public appearances, endorsements and various other non-musical ventures. It’s a way of getting Samanda in the papers, on the pop TV channels, on the radio: it’s maintaining profile (and therefore earning potential) without having to pay for any advertisements.
The really interesting thing about the iPhone SDK
…is that it’s a software development kit for the iPod too.
Slightly lost in the brouhaha surrounding the SDK announcement was the fact that Apple has also, in effect, announced an iPod SDK due to the fact that the iPod touch runs OS X.
I’ll repeat that, in case you’re still not getting it: the most popular portable music device in the world, the one everyone has, the default choice, the cultural icon, the device which Apple sells millions of each quarter, the device which has previously been closed off to all but Capcom PopCap, EA and Nike now has an SDK.
[Via Daring Fireball]
Now: is it the reflector or the director?
Terrifying figures on the front cover of supermarket trash-mag Now. Its reader survey has discovered that:
* 25% of readers go two or more days without food;
* 98% are unhappy with their bodies;
* 30% make themselves sick after eating;
* and 52% want cosmetic surgery.
In a boxout, Now says: “Here’s a thought. Why don’t we stop thinking life would be great once we get the body we desire and start living life with the one we have?” Which would be a lot more convincing if the magazine didn’t fill its pages with photos of celebrity cellulite and have a dedicated “Celebrity Diets!” spin-off…
Brooker gives both barrels
It doesn’t appear to be on Youtube yet, but last night’s episode of Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe was superb: Brooker gave TV news both barrels over the McCann case, and Power of Nightmares director Adam Curtis nailed news programmes’ fascination with user-generated content.
EMI: go digital or die
It’s stating the bleeding obvious, I know, but EMI’s new owner has said the record industry needs to embrace digital or die. But there’s more to it than just selling downloads. The whole business model needs to be looked at.
In an email to staff, financier Guy Hands says:
“The recorded music industry… has for too long been dependent on how many CDs can be sold,” he wrote. “Rather than embracing digitalisation and the opportunities it brings for promotion of product and distribution through multiple channels, the industry has stuck its head in the sand.”
Which is true. But the really important bit is where he talks about big-name acts.
“Why should they subsidise their label’s new talent roster – or for that matter their record company’s excessive expenditures and advances?”
The music business is ultimately a high-stakes gambling system. The record companies spend huge sums of money on launching new acts, and 95% of those acts never recover the money spent – but the 5% who do break even include a handful of superstars, and the profits from those superstars finance the whole shebang.
That business is only sustainable when the record labels are the only way to reach music fans, and pre-digital they were. There were all kinds of barriers to entry: the cost of recording, the logistics of pressing and distributing records, the cost of marketing, the lack of space in the mainstream media, and so on. Digital is killing all of that.
Part of it is the relentless rise of technology. I can do stuff on my Mac that I couldn’t have done in a recording studio even 10 years ago. Part of it is the rise of alternative media, social networking and other ways to spread the word without paying for PR or praying for an NME review. And part of it is the long tail. The record industry is based on a model where a handful of acts make huge sums and everybody else makes nothing – but thanks to digital, there’s now a middle way where musicians might not become superstars, but they might not starve either.
And more than anything, digital means the big acts don’t need the record companies to get their music to their fans. All you need is a web server and a bit of bandwidth, and because you’re removing so many overheads – the general overhead of being a company, the cost of manufacturing, of marketing, of paying for all the bands who shouldn’t have been given record deals in the first place – you can make a profit while charging much less. Which in turn adds to the downward pressure on the price of music, which squeezes the labels’ margins even further.
Fundamentally, the record labels need the U2s, the Radioheads, the Foo Fighters et al. But U2, Radiohead and the Foo Fighters don’t need them. If the labels can’t address that, they need to find a new business model that doesn’t use a tiny number of successes to bankroll a catalogue of extremely expensive disasters.
And if they can’t do that, they’re doomed.
Recent Comments