Archive for November, 2007
Two unrelated and rather depressing stories about journalism
Charles Arthur on Heat magazine’s offensive stickers:
But what drove Heat to such a massive misjudgement? This is a magazine that used to know its readers, and when I used to pick it up, the feeling I got was that it didn’t think its readers were cruel. But this was cruel; heartless; thoughtless. It lacked compassion.
So what’s happened to Heat? Competition.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun on the apparent firing by CNet of a veteran games writer. His crime? Giving Kane & Lynch a less than stellar review:
Our very reliable source tells us that while Gerstmann wasn’t the most popular man with the CNET owners, it was his Kane & Lynch review alone that saw him fired. You see, Eidos had just spent huge, huge amounts of money securing massive advertising across the site, skinning the entire front page with K&L commercials, along with running gimmick adverts allowing readers to cut their own K&L trailers. So a 6 wasn’t exactly the mark they were hoping for.
The UK Apple Store is having a sale
It’s not a big sale - £31 off an iMac, that kind of thing - and it’s for today only, but it’s still a sale.
Money well spent
The Scottish Government has spent some £125,000 on replacing the frankly underwhelming “The best small country in the World” slogan that previously welcomed visitors to Scotland. The new slogan had to meet tough criteria. It needed to reflect our proud industrial heritage and our high tech future, our scenic countryside and our bustling urban centres, our tradition of academic achievement and the way in which we consistently punch above our weight when it comes to innovation.
The result?
Welcome to Scotland.
Books’n'telly’n'tunes
More odds and sods:
Charlie Brooker has a new book out, called Dawn of the Dumb. It includes the column Face at the Window, which may be the funniest thing I’ve ever read. I’m not exaggerating.
The BBC4 documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives is a little gem. It follows E from Eels as he tries to find out more about his late father, a physics genius. I cried like a baby. If it’s repeated or turns up on a torrent it’s well worth your time.
Things you don’t hear very often these days, but should: I bought a Gerry Rafferty best-of today, and it’s brilliant.
Things you do hear too often these days, but shouldn’t: Christmas songs in pubs. I wouldn’t mind - well, I wouldn’t mind as much - if 99% of Christmas music wasn’t so bloody awful.
Talk about the passion
When I was little, I wanted to be an astronaut. I’d buy books about space. I’d build model space ships. I’d make up stories about space. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realised the combination of severe vertigo, fear of chest-bursting space aliens and the lack of a smoking compartment on the Space Shuttle pretty much ruled out a job with NASA.
In my teens, I swithered between wanting to be a writer and wanting to be a musician - not a rock star, but someone who made their living from music. I didn’t do anything about the writing until my mid twenties, but I did spend a great deal of time and money on the music thing. Sixteen years, I think.
Like going into space, being a full time musician wasn’t for me. I’m not even slightly miffed that i’m not in orbit, and in a lot of ways I think not being a full time musician is a lucky escape. These days I muck around with music when I feel like it and don’t when I don’t, so it remains fun rather than hard work.
What I do miss, though, is the passion, the ambition. I’m very lucky to have a job that I really enjoy, but my ambitions are pretty low-key: do more of this, do less of that, try to get the rates up there, persuade an editor to let me write about X. That sort of thing. All perfectly good, but nothing I’m likely to regret not doing when I’m shuffling off this mortal coil: “Dammit, if only I’d got that extra penny per word!” Doesn’t really work, does it?
Space, though. That was a big ambition. And so was music - it had to be, or I wouldn’t have put up with the costs and the crap of being an amateur musician. So it feels rather strange not to have that grand ambition. There’s a vague feeling of “what do I do now?”
Don’t get me wrong. There are still things I want to do, ambitions I want to fulfil. But they’re not things that keep me up at night plotting and planning, things that I’d give my right leg to make happen. And I think that’s a bit of a shame, really. Grand passions can be distracting, disruptive, maybe even destructive, but they’re always interesting.
I’m intrigued by this. Are big ambitions the preserve of the young and naive? Are they childish things to be put away when you grow up? Or am I in a minority, with everybody else harbouring a burning ambition? Is there something that drives you, other than the obvious stuff (wanting happiness for your family, having ambitions for your kids, wanting a bigger house/nicer car, that sort of thing)?
I don’t mean things like “If i had the money i’d get a BMW M5″ or “If I had the chance, I’d kick Jim Davidson in the nuts harder than anybody’s ever been kicked in the nuts before”, because they’re universal. I mean the big stuff, the widescreen, technicolour stuff. Do you yearn to drive through Paris in a sports car, the wind in your hair? Are you secretly building a robot army in your shed, preparing to wreak robotic revenge on a school bully? Are you going to change the world, write the great British novel or return the banjo to its rightful place at the heart of popular music?
Anyone?
Sam & Max on the iPhone? Yes please
Gizmodo’s been playing with a LucasArts games emulator that works fine and dandy on the iPhone, and says:
I wonder if the LucasArts people will see this and decide to partner with Apple to release updated and higher resolution versions of—at least—the Monkey Island, Indy and Sam&Max series. Or maybe Blizzard can release the good old Starcraft or Warcraft, two games that will play perfectly in this platform. Call me a nostalgic, but I would get them all.
As Alec Meer writes on the excellent Rock, Paper, Shotgun, which is rapidly becoming my favourite gaming site:
…a touch-screen phone with which I can pretend Sam & Max Hit The Road is still as funny as I thought it was ten years ago? Ooh. And yes, I know I could already do this on a horrible Windows Mobile Smartphone, but those are, as I say, horrible.
Quick book review: It’s not news, it’s Fark.com
Drew Curtis, overlord of Fark.com - probably my favourite site on the entire internet - has written a book about “how the mass media tries to pass off crap as news”. He’s right, it does, and the book does a superb (and superbly funny) job of identifying and skewering the various ways in which they do it.
Bravely, Curtis also tries to offer advice to mass media - and for me, that’s where things come unstuck. As Curtis rightly points out, not-news (such as stories about people doing stupid things with their penises, or Paris Hilton doing things with penises, or what Michael Jackson allegedly did with his penis) draws audiences. Curtis’s suggestion is that mass media splits the news and not-news into two different sections, so those of us who want proper news can get it, while those of us who want skateboarding dogs can get that too. And never the twain shall meet.
It’s a nice idea, but I really don’t see it - and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the one outlet he commends for resisting consultants’ suggestion that they redesign their site as a MySpace-a-like to court bored teens, a move guaranteed to alienate the grown-ups, is the BBC. Unlike pretty much every other media outlet on the planet, of course, the BBC isn’t funded by advertising.
For Curtis’s prescription to work, mass media outlets would need more than just a news and not-news section; they’d need publishers to keep the unprofitable news bit alive instead of dumping it and concentrating on the lucrative skateboarding dogs and penis accident stuff. And that’s the bit I have a hard time imagining. Just look at your local paper: if it’s anything like mine (and thanks to consolidation in the local news industry, it almost certainly is) they dumped expensive things like journalists a long time ago.
That said, Curtis makes some superb points throughout the book (particularly on the relationship between blogs and local newspapers, or YouTube and local TV), and probably the best one is about internet advertising. We’re told again and again that internet advertising doesn’t work - but what if it’s not internet advertising, but *all* advertising?
What if it’s not that internet advertising is any different, but that the whole advertising business is built on a giant pile of bullshit, and that it’s only since we stuck it on the internet that we’ve been able to see just how much bullshit the creatives and ad salespeople have been shovelling?
And that’s the interesting thing, because of course pretty much the entire internet seems to be pinning its hopes on advertising revenue. If Curtis’s own experience is correct (he was promised 4% conversion rates from display ads; the reality seems to be 0.2%, on a good day, if the planetary alignment is favourable and you’ve got a lucky rabbit’s foot) then an awful lot of people are fighting for shares of an advertising pie that’s 20 times smaller than they thought it was.
That’s good news for Google; not so good for the sites depending on ad income.
If I’m making it sound as if the book’s a dull “whither media?” treatise, I’m doing it a disservice. While there’s serious stuff in there if you want it, the book itself is more of a romp through media scaremongering, stupidity and other things beginning with S. It’s a hoot, and well worth buying.
Disclaimer 1: I’m still operating on sod-all sleep, so the above may not make any sense at all.
Disclaimer 2: Drew Curtis is a friend of .net magazine; I write for .net, so therefore there’s a mild conflict of interest here. That said, as far as I’m aware Drew would set the dogs on me if I turned up at his house demanding beer.
Sometimes, faster processors really are worth having
Time to encode an REM DVD to iPod using Handbrake on a G4 Powerbook: 23 and a bit hours.
Same DVD, same software, 2.33GHz MacBook Pro: 1 hour 53 minutes.
More on iPhone headphones
I’m indebted to Andi, who sent me a link to a round-up of various iPhone phones. Looks like the V-Moda Vibe Duos are the ones to get.
Tech title needs an online editor
Official Windows Vista Magazine is looking for an online editor to do groovy things on t’internet. Details on Journalism.co.uk…