Thoughts on the future of media, books
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You are currently browsing the Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter weblog archives for March, 2009.
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Mar 31, 2009 in Style
The Sunday Best has been killing it. He pointed me to these photos of men at work circa 1900. Zounds!
I’m not sure what these guys did, but some of them look pretty bad-ass. Like the guy with the pipe. Apparently there’s a whole Flickr pool of this amazing stuff.
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Mar 31, 2009 in Photo break
This one is a no-brainer. Flying was probably slower, less safe and more expensive back in the 1950s and 1960s but at least it was more humane. You’re not getting crammed in with screaming babies, inconsiderate louts and god knows who else.
Also, for some odd reason, everyone dressed up to fly. No sitting next to a schlub in trackpants and a stained t-shirt. I could do without the cigarette smoking though.
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Mystery flight to the Bahamas, Alfred Eisenstaedt
Mar 28, 2009 in Uncategorized
I want to send a big virtual thanks to Ms. Sara Beth Hayden for blogging in my absence
. Yes, I finished Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet and loved it.
Who doesn’t like a book that includes cowboys, riding the rails, maps, the Smithsonian and one precocious 12-year-old.
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A few of you will have this book foisted on you this summer.
Also, what do you do when you have a couple thousand newspaper boxes lying around
? It’s a slight problem that Seattle is having right now.
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Mar 25, 2009 in On-line
Really, really big.
National Geographic has this amazing interactive graphic on everyone’s favourite cetacean, the blue whale. Sorry humpbacks, you just don’t cut it.
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Mar 24, 2009 in Photo break
Top: British broadcaster David Frost at a newsstand (1968)
Bottom left: Newsstand in New York (1944). Click for a full-size version.
Bottom right: Newsstand in New York (1935). Click for a full-size version.
Mar 20, 2009 in Friends
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I’m of the age where some of my friends are getting married and having kids. It’s lovely. One of them is my friend Ed Keenan, editor at Eye Weekly, one of my first mentors in Toronto and all around great guy.
The fact that he’s married to Rebecca and has two (right?) lovely kids makes me pretty darned happy. Rebecca blogs at Playground Confidential
. I’m sure all of you parents can share stories with her. All of you non-parents, myself included, can just read and take notes
Mar 19, 2009 in Uncategorized
Spring is almost here. It really is. Gah.
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Via Amsterdamize, who’s got an amazing post of Spring cyclists in Amsterdam. I’m booking my plane ticket now.
Mar 18, 2009 in Media
The Shoes of the Fisherman hd Lolita movie download Ah, the great newspaper die-off continues. The Rocky Mountain News, a paper that’s been operating for more than a century folded. Yesterday, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
, one of two papers in Seattle, published its last print edition and went online only. So what’s next?
The media industry will be looking closely to see if the P-I can actually stay afloat with this new model. Scott Karp asks one of the big questions, “Just what’s going to happen to all those ad dollars?”
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Karp proposes five possible options. Number 2 on that list is that those ad dollars simply disappears, and business hit by the recession will ditch advertising. That’s probably the worst outcome for everyone involved. Even if the money migrated to Google and Craigslist there might be a way that the P-I ad sales team could enter into a side-agreement with either service. If the money goes to the Seattle Times or other papes in the city, it’ll at least keep someone in business just a bit longer.
What’s got me a bit confused is the low headcount at the P-I. The online editorial operation at the P-I will be running with 20 people (the original newsroom was staffed by 165). Seattle isn’t a small town. Three major, industry-shaking businesses (Starbucks, Microsoft, Amazon) call it home. It has a major university, a great music scene and a professional baseball team. Can 20 people cover all of this? I don’t think so. Even if those 20-people have been asked to take photos, edit, report, blog and god knows what else.
If the quality of the P-I’s online edition drops dramatically in the crucial first months, then readers (and eventually advertisers) just won’t come back. This post disagrees with my reading of this and says that the P-I is on the right track by running its operation with as few staff as possible and thinking more like a start-up.
Mar 16, 2009 in Media
It seems like everyone is talking about the death of the media and newspapers in particular. The CBC even ran a longish piece on it, which means even your aunt Muriel in Red Deer is now worried about whether her paper is going to go belly up tomorrow. For very obvious reasons, it’s been something that I’ve been thinking about for some time. I’m pointing out to a few of the good things that I’ve run across recently.
A lot of people have picked up on and passed along this Clay Shirky post on why the newspaper might be completely doomed.
The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.
The newspaper business, in fact most media, is undergoing a massive revolution. Not unlike the one that followed the invention of movable type in Europe. It’s chaotic, messy and scary.
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.
A little bit more hopeful is Steven Johnson’s look at the media. Johnson argues that the media ecosystem is changing from ‘a desert to a rainforest.’ He cites the in-depth coverage of technology news as his tip-of-the-spear example. Back when Johnson was in college (1987 to be exact), Johnson, the Mac aficionado had to duck into his local campus bookstore for the latest issue of Macworld. Today news and gossip about Apple is available from dozens if not hundreds of sources.
What’s happened with technology and politics is happening elsewhere too, just on a different timetable. Sports, business, reviews of movies, books, restaurants – all the staples of the old newspaper format are proliferating online. There are more perspectives; there is more depth and more surface now. And that’s the new growth. It’s only started maturing.
What’s refreshing about both these pieces is how they try to remind us to work through these problems. Sure, it’s scary working in media right now. It’s sad to see papers with decades of history and ties to a community close shop. But as both of these articles point out, it’s probably a better idea to look ahead and try to figure out how a journalist or an institution can fit in to a new media environment rather than trying to turn back the clock and salvage what’s left of a dying business model.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t link out to the Pew Project’s State of the News Media report, which became available today. And if all of this doesn’t quite satisfy the appetite I will direct you to the Globe’s Mathew Ingram who seems to think more about this stuff than I do (and that’s a lot of time in a week). Also worthwhile is the Nieman Journalism Lab
, who seem to be chock-a-block full of people who have a single-minded dedication to trying to make all of this stuff work.
Photo from the Life Archive on Google.
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Mar 13, 2009 in On-line
No, not me. Mine’s been so-so. What with winter not going away.
, they’re having an awesome week.
Let’s start with these ridiculously great old woodcuts of the whaling trade. Follow it up with old French maps
Transformers hd and a great photo essay on truffle pickers. Cap it all off with a defence of a good ol’ beer. Bonus points for unearthing an ad where the name John Steinbeck has to be explained with the title “famous novelist.” Oh, you meant John Steinbeck, third-rate professional bowler? Why didn’t you say so!
