Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter

52 in 52 is a project to read a book a week in 2010

Sometime in the early 2000s karaoke, a fringe activity that was firmly in the domain of Asian people and pseudo-exhibitionists, went mainstream. I always had some idea as to why this happened but culture writer Bryan Raftery has done a better job of telling this story.

To him it was the great confluence of reality TV (especially American Idol), the rise of teenybopper pop such as the Backstreet Boys, faux nostalgia and a growing comfort around amateur performance. Don’t Stop Believin‘, is part personal memoir and part cultural history. He talks about a long-gone and once beloved karaoke bar in New York’s Lower East Side, binging on karaoke and more. Yes, I got jealous that he got to fly to Japan and sing karaoke with his  best friend as “research” for this book.

For me, a self-confessed karaoke junkie, parts of Raftery’s book are very familiar. Don’t Stop Believin’ is not unlike hearing a stranger at a karaoke night belt out a song that you love. You can’t help but sing along and you sure as hell applaud at the end of the song.

As an aside, check out this great blog post from Flickr, what else, karaoke.

Photo by George Silk, 1951. From the Life Archive

I was going to do a round-up of magazine apps on the iPhone but I got lazy. I still might, but for now, you’re going to have to just read this post on apps that don’t currently exist but probably should. Note that they focus on men’s magazines. I did get  a chance to download both the GQ and Esquire apps and was pretty unimpressed by both of them. Both apps are essentially straight lifts of their magazines with a few multimedia frills thrown in. Yawn.  Here’s their preview:

If you’re curious, journalism instructor and online editor Kat Tancock reviews the GQ app.

1) the Esquire drinks app

What Esquire is good at are drinks, they’ve done whole books about them. They even have a databse on their website. As a bonus, the ad guys at the mag could very easily sell ads on this. Some of their high-end drink clients would undoubtedly bank-roll a drinks/bartending application

2) Esquire/GQ girl of the day

Hey, if newspapers can run photos of a sunshine girl, why can’t Esquire and GQ? The magazine already runs features like these in the magazine. It’d be easy to repurpose. It would also be a good way to upsell the full-mag. Preview a photo from a spread and point to your website or your mag.

3) A shopping app for men

Women have the app from shopping mag Lucky, but the boys are screwed. Hey, we like stuff too. And it doesn’t have to be all clothes. You know. Wired’s got one, but everyone knows Wired is for nerds. You guys are cool.

The BBC airs a documentary series which looks at stuff…

From Fast Company:

What makes us human? It’s our stuff.

A truly incredible radio series from the BBC traces the history of human civilization through 100 objects from the British Museum. It kicked off last week with an Egyptian mummyfrom the third century BC (the series apparently isn’t purely chronological–object number 2 was a 1.8-million-year-old carved stone chopping tool). The show runs through September, ending with modern marvels like the credit card, Soviet propaganda, and Hokusai’s famous Wave. Object 100 is still a secret though–any guesses?

Esquire’s Charles Pierce has good things to say about the State of the Union.

TMN’s Robert Birnbaum looks at a new anthology of European fiction edited by personal favourite Aleksandar Hemon.

Finally, because those nights are still cold… the Amateur Gourmet’s Soup Battle of 2010. FYI Vesalka’s Cabbage Soup is hella delicious.

I know it’s cold, but put on your best wooly hat and keep your chin up.

Image from here and spotted by the keen-eyed Jenn Godbout.

52 in 52 is a project to read a book a week in 2010

After two novels to start the year, it was about time I sunk my teeth into some non-fiction. I wanted something light and fun and this book hits the spot. Victoria Moore, the Guardian’s wine columnist, has given us a delightful little book on drinking well throughout the year. And she doesn’t just write about booze. Moore has written a very nice primer on juices, coffees and, that most British of drinks, tea.

Of course, some parts of the book were a bit like torture. The recipes on summer drinks had me aching for bike rides to the park and picnic (also, large pitchers of Pimms and mint juleps). But I’m probably more likely to start with some of the winter drinks. Some of you might be lucky to see them at a dinner party soon.

Moore should also send a thank-you card to her book designer, Heredesign, for elevating this book with dozens of charming letterpress-inspired illustrations throughout the book. I’ve embedded the Google Books excerpt for your perusal.

Lets start this week off light with a few fun things I’ve been reading.

The Atlantic points to an adorable story from the Financial Times on the dogs who live in Moscow’s extensive subway system.

From that story:

There is one special sub-group of strays that stands apart from the rest: Moscow’s metro dogs. “The metro dog appeared for the simple reason that it was permitted to enter,” says Andrei Neuronov, an author and specialist in animal behaviour and psychology, who has worked with Vladimir Putin’s black female Labrador retriever, Connie (“a very nice pup”). “This began in the late 1980s during perestroika,” he says. “When more food appeared, people began to live better and feed strays.” The dogs started by riding on overground trams and buses, where supervisors were becoming increasingly thin on the ground.

Boing Boing ran a series of delightful posts from animation archivist Stephen Worth called “adventures in music.” Worth looks at everything from Booker T and the MGs (see below) to Leonard Bernstein. Great fun.

Finally, personal fave Junot Diaz writes about Obama’s failure to give us a narrative about his presidency.

All year I’ve been waiting for Obama to flex his narrative muscles, to tell the story of his presidency, of his Administration, to tell the story of where our country is going and why we should help deliver it there. A coherent, accessible, compelling story—one that is narrow enough to be held in our minds and hearts and that nevertheless is roomy enough for us, the audience, to weave our own predilections, dreams, fears, experiences into its fabric. It should necessarily be a story eight years in duration, a story that no matter what our personal politics are will excite us enough to go out and reëlect the teller just so we can be there for the story’s end. But from where I sit our President has not even told a bad story; he, in my opinion, has told no story at all. I heard him talk healthcare to death but while he was elaborating ideas his opponents were telling stories. Sure they were bad ones, full of distortions and outright lies, but at least they were talking to the American people in the correct idiom: that of narrative. The President gave us a raft of information about why healthcare would be a swell idea; the Republicans gave us death panels. Ideas are wonderful things, but unless they’re couched in a good story they can do nothing.

A reminder for the work week ahead. Although for most of us this means wearing plenty of lotion and keeping those mitts on.

Earlier this week The New York Times finally announced its plan for a paywall starting in 2011. There really aren’t any surprises and I rounded-up some of the rumours earlier. But the announcement has rekindled the commentary and punditry about the Times paywall.

From the horse’s mouth

Starting in January 2011, a visitor to NYTimes.com will be allowed to view a certain number of articles free each month; to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the print newspaper, even those who subscribe only to the Sunday paper, will receive full access to the site without any additional charge.

Executives of The New York Times Company said they wanted to create a system that would have little effect on the millions of occasional visitors to the site, while trying to cash in on the loyalty of more devoted readers. But fundamental features of the plan have not yet been decided, including how much the paper will charge for online subscriptions or how many articles a reader will be allowed to see without paying.

Times media columnist David Carr tries to explain his bosses’ decision and there are some interesting points that I’ll pull out below:

1. The paywall is a flexible tool. The NYT will be able to dial up or down the amount of free articles, charge more or less for online subs.

By building a metered system, the executives have installed a dial on the huge, heaving content machine of The New York Times. Access can be gradually ramped up or down depending on macro trends in the market. Given the dynamic state of the advertising business and how quickly things change on the Web, not so dumb when you think about it.

2. What works for a big brand like the Times might not work for a small paper.

People will assign all manner of broader meaning to The Times’s approach, but The New York Times – like The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, which also charge for content – is very much a unique business and consumer proposition. What might work for The New York Times probably won’t work for a regional daily. There will be a lot of speculation on price – The Times is, in part, defining what a digital newspaper is worth – but that number is far less important than habituating a certain kind of consumer to the idea that conveniently accessing certain kinds of content is worth money.

3. Being the middleman is GOLD.

One of the biggest lessons of Web 2.0 is that the company that controls the relationship with consumers is the one that owns the future. It would have been much more expedient to partner with Amazon or iTunes, because they already have the machinery in place and own the credit cards of millions of consumers. But in the long run, they would have controlled and benefited from the relationship far more than The Times.

The more mathematically minded should read Felix Salmon’s post on the numbers behind the paywall.

From the post:

The way that it seems the NYT paywall is going to work, visitors to nytimes.com will have a free allowance of n articles per month. To read the n+1th article, they will have to pay a subscription fee F. After that, they can read as many articles as they like for the rest of the month.

If a visitor to nytimes.com normally reads N articles per month, then the key number in their mind will be N-n. If reading that number of articles is worth more to them than F, they’ll pay the fee. If on the other hand N-n is small, or perceived value-per-article is small, then they won’t pay. Specifically, if the average value to the reader of any given article is v, then they’ll pay the fee when v(N-n)>F.

Across the pond the Daily Telegraph weighs in on the paywall question and says that it likely won’t work, simply because there are too many ways to get around it.

Ken Doctor over at his blog Content Bridges tries to answer nine questions about the Times’ strategy.

And the good people at the Nieman Lab, who are paid to think about this stuff all the time, have an amazing roundup of talk about the Times. Happy reading.