Representatives for Facebook told Mashable, “Facebook isn’t a content creator, so it’s not accurate to call us a media company.” As always, Facebook points to its members, the people who use Facebook to post their own photos and stories as its real content creators.
What Facebook Paper is doing is aggregation. I find it inconceivable that at some point, Facebook would not toy with the idea of “exclusive” or “original” content, even if it is from a third party.
Back in 2011, the ShortFormBlog squirted out an interesting post that highlighted the great disparity between some of the covers of Time Magazine’s US and global editions. While the Asia, South Pacific and Europe editions asked questions about what the Egypt uprisings meant for the Middle East, the US edition pondered whether anxiety might actually be good for us.
It was a smart observation by ShortForm of a series of awkward juxtapositions by Time. Some of the conclusions that followed elsewhere, however, weren’t so smart and relied a little too heavily on stereotype: that Americans are insular and generally very ignorant about what lies beyond those shining seas. Well, I’m neither going to shoot down those cliches nor defend Time’s choice of covers for its US edition.
While older folks remember when Time had authority, 30-something readers like myself look to other platforms for global commentary these days, increasingly the financial and tech press whose insights into the state of the world are as relevant as those of more politically-focused publications (Time Magazine – who reads that?) What did get me thinking is this belief implicit in the criticism that a magazine like Time ought to have positioned its international content as its main attraction. Why should it? The US news market is not bereft of commentary and coverage of these events. And it’s not as if Americans are ambivalent about what happens in the Middle East as the first decade of this century has clearly shown. What’s more, Time is reinventing itself, perhaps in much the same way as every other traditional news platform is, following in the footsteps of the mighty Hearst empire that still has assets but doesn’t really move the news needle these days. So why not move onto something else to write about instead of coming third or fourth place in a race to produce coverage that generally ends up being no different to anything else out there?
That might sound defeatist but if your parent company is struggling to support the investment required to keep you at the front of the pack in world news, then why not look at other ways you can win? Like writing about more nebulous sociological observations, technological trends or deep character profiles. Yes, to an extent it’s decline management but therein also lies a kind of creative that pairs the wisdom of old heads with new opportunities.
Looking beyond Time, which is a US publication with an international brand, why is there an expectation that outlets need to invest in global news coverage to remain relevant, (even if it is just an AP feed)? My worry is not that traditional media takes it cross hairs off of global events, it’s that more local reporting loses all its key players (it was good to see this commentary about Wall Street Journal’s Greater New York supplement).
What big media can bring to the local scene is global, regional or national context. I’ve written about this before: there are great news stories outside of the alpha and beta global cities that are of global relevance. There’s no reason why big media can’t bridge the gulf between the macro and the micro to make for stronger local content that travels into a wider catchment. But as I’ve also said before, I suspect that the ones that will achieve this are not the traditional media outlets but the emerging kings of data.
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Big news for one Singapore startup today: Viki is very well-known among Singapore’s startup community and is very familiar to K-drama and J-drama tragics. But it’s probably not particularly well-known in the general Anglosphere.
The nuts-and-bolts are as such: Japanese online retail site Rakuten reportedly buys Viki for US$200 million.
Viki’s concept is simple in theory but tricky in execution: a community of translators provide subtitles for “foreign-language” television content. That foreign-language could be in pretty well any language – so could the translated subtitles. So, you could have a Korean soap with Croatian subtitles. I wrote about these guys on a couple of occasions, one of those times when they were nominated for the Wall Street Journal’s Asian Innovation Awards.
Razmig Hovaghimian is Viki’s highly-focused and super-positive CEO. He understands the market economics of global television, having worked with NBC Universal. He understands the economics of language translation, speaking about five or so of them himself. He understands cross-cultural flows (he is a U.S.-educated Armenian-Egyptian married to a Japanese woman, living in Singapore with a couple of kids.) Most importantly, he understands the principle of “content arbitrage”: unlocking the latent value of one market’s content for consumption in much bigger markets elsewhere. While Viki doesn’t create any new television, by slapping subtitles onto the content it is able to acquire, it can access large new markets. Why would someone in the Philippines want to watch a Venezuelan novella? You’d have to ask the thousands of Filipinos doing just this. From a data point of view, the inflows and outflows of content between different language markets make for very thought-provoking reading. It could also seriously disrupt the primacy of English-language content in the global entertainment market.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t exactly spent lots of time immersed in Korean, Taiwanese or Egyptian soaps on Viki. I think this is a brilliant concept but it takes a lot of sweat to get it right and keep the volumes fresh.
The concept of “content arbitrage” goes back to what I wrote in my last post about why entrepreneurs and tycoons see value in local (as opposed to global or national) news outlets: they’re producing something nobody else on the planet is and this product might just be of deep value to someone, somewhere else in the world if only the technology exists to transport it.
Rakuten could have a bit of fun with Viki, though I’d be lying if I said I had any real ideas as to how. As is usually the case with these sorts of acquisitions, trying to imagine the synergies and how possible new products from both sides of the marriage could look is like trying to guess what your children will look like before they’re born. Probably what gets scribbled on the whiteboard now will look nothing like the reality. I’d say the same for Jeff Bezos’s acquisition of The Washington Post. Importantly, Rakuten now has a video piece in Viki and an e-books piece in the Kobo e-reader technology it acquired in 2012. The broad point remains the same: outfits with fresh content are now finding suitors from a much wider range of industries, not just traditional media players.
I wrote a blog post back in June asking if old media houses might one day sell themselves to Silicon Valley giants. Anyway, two months later I get an answer – sort of.
Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post seems to make perfect sense to me although I don’t know very much about this transaction beyond the surface reporting we’ve seen so far.
There’s possibly a lot more that can be done on this front, many more old media companies that can join a more cashed up operation like Facebook or Google (platform neutrality be damned). This of course will change the nature of journalism. A more secure revenue base will lift the standard of reporting above the base stenographic and press release-driven “churnalism” of the past 15-years while integration with a technological platform like Amazon will connect journalists with the rich data ecosystems many of these new platforms boast. Data in and of itself, as anyone at Bloomberg will tell you, is news.
A while back, I also wondered what the future of smaller newspapers (those with a metropolitan or regional focus rather than a national or global one) was. Warren Buffett’s acquisition of a series of small town newspapers, again, makes a lot of sense to me.
What I find interesting is that almost a decade after I left my first newspaper job in Temora, Australia, (a sheep-and-wheat town of about 7,000 five hours west of Sydney) the bi-weekly Temora Independent still has no website of which to speak. This might not sound particularly surprising if anyone knows what sleepy Temora is like, but what it tells me is that these tiny news outlets are still providing news and information that no one else is, so much so they haven’t needed to invest in innovation to remain relevant. This means something and it means something to more than just the people of Temora, which is presumably why Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway sees value in local American newspapers (in some cases very local).
Why do I say this? I don’t have any strong economic argument or market research to back this up, but my gut tells me local reporting will soon become highly prized well beyond the small markets they’ve traditionally served. These are towns that are usually too small to matter to major media outlets but they are rich in narratives. While I always aspired to work for a global news outlet for professional reasons, to be honest, the most interesting stories I ever came across came out of Temora. That might not say much for me as a journalist but for what it’s worth, there was David Schlunke, an artist who built a three-storey house in the middle of the thicket out of bottles, mud and an assortment of junk. There was Rosie Blachut who showed me her single-engine bi-plane which she too built herself. There was Gil Venz, the local Baptist pastor, who was staying with Christian missionary Graham Staines and his two young sons in India the night the three were burnt to death by an angry mob. David Lowy, the son of Westfield shopping mall mogul Frank Lowy, had set up an aviation museum in Temora full of working vintage fighter planes. Anecdotally, there are things I’ve done and things I’ve seen in these small towns that I don’t think I’ll ever do or see again in my life.
There is a depth of storytelling that the local news players have at their finger tips and as is the case with most of my examples above, you’d be hard-pressed to find much on the internet about any of these stories.
Somewhere in the bundles of yarn small town reporters gather lie bits of string that fit into much larger stories. An entrepreneur that can break down silos and integrate the resources of disparate and locally invested small-town papers could be onto something big. The key to unlocking this synergy is technological investment. I think both Buffett and Bezos are the start of a new wave of old media transformations.
There are a few niggling issues on the Apple approval side, which I hope to have sorted for a July release. I’d have liked to have seen it out now, but getting it right is important.
I’ll keep you posted…
No, it isn’t. Just wanted to get your attention.
News is a mug’s game…always has been. As a product itself, it makes no money and despite the shit salary, good journalism is expensive, dangerous and highly speculative. If you’re a journalist, it’s a physically-demanding pursuit that requires some sociopathic tendencies to succeed at either the coal-face or managerial levels. All traditional outlets face the same problem: a failure to offset the cost-center demands of good journalism with any kind of revenue.
In the olden days, if you had the medium, be it a big-ass printing press or broadcast license, you commoditized it by adding a news service and game shows, because that’s what an audience wanted.
So I’ve been wondering this for a while now: why haven’t the new gatekeepers –Facebook, Google, Amazon etc.–established their own news gathering capabilities? Maybe I’m missing some very important piece of this puzzle so I’m really just thinking aloud. I’m aware the news product is evolving and it will continue to do so. But the principles of supply and demand are more time-honored. Here are some assumptions underlying (but not answering) my question:
They have the platform…
This is pretty straightforward. They saw the opening, they developed the technology and they made it grow. Now they reach such large chunks of the earth’s population that the traditional new outlets have become totally dependent on them for distribution.
…but they don’t have the brand
These guys have perhaps serendipitously found a new role as a news platform but they haven’t been able to create a reputation for news gathering and reliability. Yes, traditional news outlets are flawed and have an awful reputation ethically – but most people would still prefer to have a third-party voice that is dedicated to reporting than have to rely on the sole voices of interested parties, those being governments and big corporations. There are a million and one aggregators out there…none of which would exist if it weren’t for traditional news outlets.
Could Facebook et al. draw on the talent and resources of our dying news institutions (or just buyout AP, Reuters or some struggling newswire) and let the synergy do the rest?
They already sit on a great steaming pile of data
Data is news. Scary, I know. Traditional news outlets can only dream of having the sorts of bird’s-eye-views of what is moving thematically and semantically that the new gatekeepers have. And that doesn’t even take into account the granular and intimate detail to which the new gatekeepers have access. If editors could make decisions about what to report based on a deep analysis on how the masses were behaving (and not just in terms of reader traffic), content would look quite different. Bloomberg already has something resembling this approach, albeit with financial market activity and controversially data on their own clients’ actions. Bloomberg, incidentally, is one of the few major outlets that is still adding headcount.
A mountain of data equals a mountain of ethical questions. I’m not saying a merger between new technology and news reporting is a good or bad thing. But it’s not a question of “do I trust Facebook with my data?” rather, “do I trust the reportage of an outlet with access to such quantities of data?”
It wouldn’t hurt…but they don’t have to
News reporting is not their core business, so why would they?
The new players have a captive market already. While traditional news outlets do have their own internet portals (websites and apps), they are dependent on a native and derivative presence within the new digital ecosystems whether it’s iOS, Twitter, Facebook or being curated by the likes of Google.
But if the old school news gatherers continue to thin out wouldn’t it create some competitive advantage for those with the upper hand digitally to start creating highly-prized news content, not just be a big fat agnostic platform?
On a relative scale, the outlay would not be tremendous. The incentive may not be for a new player to buy an old player, rather for an old player to sell itself to a new player: in other words, it would be up to traditional news to make the case for someone else to buy them.
Tech companies have tried the news game before : MSNBC, Yahoo! The former is resting in peace and the latter has struggled to make much of an impact as that platform’s brand has floundered (though Marissa Mayer’s renewed focus on content could change this.)
News organizations aren’t built overnight but with the old guard in a sunset phase, building from a standing start with the expertise of dying empires may be a bit easier than it once was. It may also be the only way for the traditional craft of journalism to survive.
So…almost five months since I quit my job I have the first real evidence that I haven’t just been drinking coffee and playing my PS3 (which is flashing the Yellow Light of Death, sadly.)
Here it is: an illustrated/interactive version of The Great Gatsby for the iPad (should be in the store soon, pending usual Apple hoops.) And if you didn’t guess it, you can now see where the name of my company comes from.
I’m very proud of this product and especially the artwork, which is original and was done by Michigan-based artist Mike Schwartz (his stuff above and below.) He is a very talented and efficient artist who instinctively understands the text, its characters and the scenes depicted. I hope this app can really help drive his profile and look forward to seeing more of his stuff.
So what’s this all about?
We know about Baz Luhrmann’s movie (I’m yet to actually see it.) You may have even read the novel at some point. On the surface, this product includes a bunch of value-adds through the illustrations, maps, my own research of this text and the other interactive features. Things that may have made sense when the book was first published in 1925 but are lost in the wash of historical context more than eight decades later are explained in convenient and unobtrusive pop-up notes. There are also maps of the story’s geography, which are designed to address a major gripe from e-book readers about how inaccessible in-story maps are on reading devices. With a little more work and investment, something like this is a good product for the education market. Sure enough that’s where I’m headed (wish me luck.)
But it’s more than that.
Here’s the bet: good narratives and storytelling are the new frontiers for the digital economy, the railroads upon which new cities and trading posts will spring. Content is everywhere, so are social networks. Good content–well-crafted and well-curated–is less ubiquitous. Storytelling, be it through narratives old or new, can take us to a lot of new places. I don’t believe digital technology or Silicon Valley has worked out the best possible way(s) to take us there just yet. I know for a fact that big, dirty digital utilities companies are looking very closely at how storycraft can create new digital on-ramps for them. I don’t pretend that my Gatsby adaptation comes close to this dream, but it’s a baby step.
If this sounds conceptual, wanky and meaningless, then I’ll let the future do the talking. In the meantime, watch for more products like this. I’ll be blogging shamelessly about them and what they mean for my livelihood.
New York is indeed the best city in the world. I don’t care what it throws at me: psychotic subway vagrants, violent bouncers, a nasty blizzard or a 36 hour door-to-door journey…yes I had fun with all that but I still love the fast moving brilliance of its creatives, the lack of haughtiness that pervades Old World global cities and that feeling that, despite everything that’s taken place in the past decade, this is still the most important place to be on this planet.
I was in this great city for O’Reilly’s Tools of Change digital publishing conference. I might sound like a doe-eyed publishing newb but it was fantastic to be able to see and hear so many of the great pundits and professionals in this industry whose blogs I read every day.
I recommend checking out conference videos from Inkling’s Matt MacInnis, Tim O’Reilly from his eponymous publishing company, Maria Popova from the awesome blog Brain Pickings and comic creator Mark Waid to get a sense of what’s happening in this space.
For all that’s said about the rise of Asia, there is still nothing in my own hemisphere that compares with this gathering. There maybe something I missed but I don’t think I saw a single delegate or speaker from Asia Pacific, though there were a few from the Middle East interested in developing Arabic- and Farsi-script e-books.
The biggest takeaway for me from this shindig is the sobering fact that whatever brilliant ideas I had about what I could achieve in the world of digital publishing, there is already a host of brilliant minds that are about 5-years ahead of me in these innovations. In some ways, that’s a lovely validation but it also means this race has already started and I just happened to land myself on the back of the second wave of runners.
The most salient highlight was the official launch of Inkling’s Habitat platform, which basically empowers any writer who wants to use the full functionality of HTML5 to build their product. Speaking of which, it was also encouraging to see industry moving to some degree of format harmonization at a much faster pace than was the case with digital formats back in the 1980s. Not surprisingly, the Kindle’s tardiness in moving toward using HTML5 has come under close scrutiny and many people see great opportunities to fill the void that sits tantalizingly gaping: humanity needs a solid e-reader (not just a browser) that can turn HTML5 into brain candy the for the 21st century bookworm. That said, there is another camp that awaits ePub3 to come good and deliver pretty much everything HTML5 can, which could also prove a game changer when that moment arrives.
A computer science still searching for a problem to solve is the bookish language around indexing and metadata. There was much chatter on this for people from Laura Dawson from Bowker and Hugh Maguire but both concede monetization remains elusive but that’s encouraging as it means it will just take some kind of visionary to make it happen.
There seems to be some kind of consensus that digital reading is currently in the “early mainstream” phase of the commercial and technological cycle, by Geoffrey Moore’s measurement of these movements.
So I have a bad feeling that whatever I’ve written in the real-estate above will be either gobbledygook to my nearest and dearest or just stupidly obvious to those who might actually take a professional interest in this technology. One interesting thing I had the providence to discover was what is taking place in the world of Bible publishing. Whatever you make of Christianity, religion or the Bible, there is no escaping the historical fact that the good book’s development as a published text has at all points been matched by broader changes in human history…from its transition from oral to written to printed media to the revolutions that challenged the supremacy of Latin as the authoritative language of the book.
I chatted to a couple of guys from Biblica, which publishes the New International Version of the Bible, who have published a version of their text that strips out chapter and verse numbers to restore the narrative that once existed but in its raw form. Little do many Bible readers realize that these numbers, which have been a great navigational device over the centuries, were not part of the original text. Digital technology now opens the way for alternative and much more effective navigational mechanisms however I do honestly wonder how much political and conservative nonsense these innovators of Bible reading may face as they seek to open up this book to much wider acceptance. I have lots of ideas about how innovators can make this ancient text a much more dynamic one so it was good to get out and see what’s happening already. I will post more on this in the future but again, it was exciting to see people have already been giving this some thought.
I also want to say that in all honesty this trip would not have been possible but for one person who believes in what I’m doing and that’s my wife. It’s pretty difficult for a man who’s left his full-time paying job to make the case for a conference trip half way across the globe leaving his wife and infant all alone for almost two weeks. But my wife not only gave me permission, she encouraged me to go.
One other great thing about this trip was the chance to see my brother who lives in beautiful upstate New York, the first time in almost three years that I’ve been able to see him and his wife in person. We saw some good biff at the local ice-hockey match and beautiful snow-covered countryside in the hills near where he lives…more on that another time.
Saturday was my turn to look after my daughter for the day while the wife went out and did some other stuff. It’s usually better to get your kid out of the house on such days; even if an outdoor adventure flying solo with the one-year-old is harder work, we both get more out of the day than we would if I was trying to pass the time with a DVD and keep Elsa entertained at the same time.
So I headed to the ArtScience Museum with Elsa to check out their traveling exhibits. I have to admit, I’ve become quite fond of this museum in the couple of years since it opened, despite earlier misgivings about it being a minor monument to everything wrong with modern Singapore (the much larger Marina Bay Sands behind it being the major monument). Yes, it’s expensive to get in but I have seen some pretty good displays there such as the Tang dynasty treasures uncovered from the Beilitung shipwreck and the Salvador Dali and the Andy Warhol exhibits.
The Art of the Brick is the main one showing at the moment and features a bunch of sculptures made out of Lego by artist Nathan Sawaya.
I’ve never been overly impressed with elaborate Lego constructions, even as a kid: there’s no texture and no real depth of colour. The characters all look the same and the whole thing just has this one-dimensionality about it. The worlds you could build were always going to have this rigidness about them with little room for surprise or twists and turns.
It’s a great product to play with but always more of an engineer’s toy than an artist’s toy. Sawaya challenged this prejudice of mine. He actually does what the best artists and innovators do: create enduring solutions by working within the box.
His works are both deep and fun. At a minimum, they might resemble the kind of postmodern sculptures you’d see in sterile corporate parks around the world: Atlas-like figures breaking through barriers, carrying large objects, co-operating with eachother, that sort of thing. The most impressive thing about Sawaya’s sculptures to me is the way he’s been able to use a medium primarily designed to express architectural or mechanical visions and reshape it speak to the human experience. It’s a reminder of how something that has been used in a specific way for generations can find new life through new expressions.
This one is legit – I placed Elsa in the seat and she just struck this pose. What can I say?
Call me simple but The Hobbit is my favourite book – more than Lord of the Rings, more than any other book. I read it at the age of 12 and for some weird reason knew then and there that every other fantasy novel that had been published since was mere derivative.
Thus I went into Peter Jackson’s adaptation today with low expectations and the best I can say is I wasn’t disappointed. Forget box-office success – the movie will work financially and deserves to do so. My main quibble is how encumbered this adaptation is with the trappings of Jackson’s LOTR trilogy and feels more like an embellished prequel than a rendering of the fantastic children’s story Tolkien published in 1937.
My 1975 Allen and Unwin reset edition of The Hobbit has 253 pages. Three hours of the first part of this new file trilogy and we’re up to page 99. Much has been written about the unwieldiness of piping The Hobbit into three new movies. I suspect Jackson feels that by plugging into the universe he created more than a decade ago, he is obliged to further populate the forests and mountains with characters that ought not be there and add some dense backstory. Hence we find a flirtatious Galadriel, odious Saruman and bunny-sledding Radagast. Mercifully Jackson has spared us Tom Bombadil. It’s all a bit too much for a story that was originally a much more nimble read than the fat tome that followed in the 1950s.
Could The Hobbit have benefited from being rebuilt from the ground up by a fresh creative mind? It would be hard to better Sir Ian McKellen’s Gandalf, true enough, but I can’t help but feel this could have been someone else’s baby. Here are some suggestions, some wackier than others:
Joe Wright (Atonement, Pride and Prejudice)
An eye for English period splendour and grim subterranean scenes, Wright sets up an awesome long take. His narratives take you from the gentleness of the countryside to the terrors of the battlefield.
Alfonso Cuarón (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Children of Men)
Also a master of long shot, Curarón knows how to tell a tight story and create elaborate sets. His fantasy-derived characters also have a depth and realism often lacking in other films of the genre.
Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Ponyo, Howl’s Moving Castle)
The Hobbit as a narrative might be slightly too linear to be squeezed into the anime genre, but if you want to recreate Middle Earth, you could do worse than Miyazaki whose dreamscapes are the stuff of visceral burn.
Jerry Bruckheimer (The Rock, Top Gun)
Maybe not. But one thing that always struck me was the way The Rock was a modern-day take on The Hobbit: a gormless boffin (Nicholas Cage) is reluctantly dragged into a mission by a pack of battle-hardened soldiers led by a sage old man with a white beard (Sean Connery). It also involved lots of wriggling around tunnels.
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