Media Archives
June 08, 2007
Channel 4 - more useful than ever
I'm very impatient this morning with the clueless and elitist response from mainstream media to Channel 4's latest race row. Big Brother has provided C4 with two opportunities to tackle racism in Britain in the last six months and both turned out to be more effective interventions than any number of indignant newspaper editorials or dopey Government campaigns.
If white kids in Britain really are going around calling each other 'nigger' (and that's what silly Emily seems to be telling us) then that's valuable information – information that ought to be in the public domain. If reaching those white kids and helping them to understand what it means to call another human being 'nigger' is a legitimate goal then I'll trust Channel 4 to do it before The Daily Mail or the Today Programme (Embattled Andy Duncan handled silly old Humphrys beautifully on Today this morning – he must have been on a course).
February 16, 2007
Better than reading the menu
You mean your club doesn't have a dirty great, broadsheet- sized, full-colour intellectual quarterly? Really? Mine does. Clever Giuseppe Mascoli, who's been sprucing up Blacks in Dean Street a bit lately, has a hand in The Drawbridge, a really quite amazing pinkish newspaper full of the kind of tousled sociopaths you used to see only in The New Left Review.
A roster that includes cheeky Slavoj Zižek, cuddly John Berger, prickly Noam Chomsky and bloody Gerry Adams (plus loads of other lefties, situationists and topers you've heard of). Fair takes the breath away.
All, I'm reliably assured, were chivvied into producing copy (this issue's theme is 'Failure') because they are members and no money changed hands. This I don't believe. If Gerry Adams is a member of Blacks it's definitely news to me: I've seen various former Pythons, a few think-tankers and billions of media types at Blacks, but definitely not Noam Chomsky. I wonder if they're doling out honorary memberships in return for contributions...
January 17, 2007
Unhelpful message
There were 11 weekly women's magazines on the shelves in our local supermarket this afternoon. Take a look at these pics and see if you can find the one that doesn't have a feature about a celebrity eating disorder or a great new diet or a dieting disaster (clue: there isn't one).
August 29, 2006
How much is music worth?
Universal's spin is that they're going to give away music downloads to defeat the file sharers. It's not true.
To understand why the Spiral Frog announcement is important you need to understand what Apple's iTunes Music Store has done to the music industry. iTunes is important for all sorts of reasons, obviously but – as far as the labels are concerned – for one really big reason: Apple robbed the record companies of their pricing power.
Steve Jobs stepped in, chucked his weight around a bit and cheekily took away the labels' right to set prices and thus any meaningful control over their own profitability. The big fights between the labels and iTunes during these vital first three years have all centred on Apple's stubborn insistence on a single, fixed price per track with no variation for fame, historic sales, up-to-dateness, trendiness... anything really.
You don't need to be an economist to understand that pricing power is fundamental to a sector's success. If the biggest players in an industry can't set their own prices they are effectively reduced to dependent status. For an outsider to enter an unfamiliar industry and, in short order, to seize ownership of the most fundamental economic lever – the big red one marked 'don't touch . Not ever' – from under the noses of the industry's biggest players – is a feat of quite awesome self-confidence and one never attempted by a Tech firm before.
Universal (and, presumably, other labels as yet unannounced) have decided they're not going to wait around while Apple reduces their hundred year-old industry to a blackened shell. They're going to take the fight back to Apple, do something really unexpected and attack them where they are least able to respond. Giving away music (no matter how onerous the embedded DRM scheme is) is the most radical thing the industry has decided to do in that whole Century-long history.
It requires trashing the business' only stable, continuously-profitable business model and jumping aboard the advertising train. Of course, they won't be alone – they'll join the respectable roster of media businesses whose only or principle source of income is advertising: radio, network television, newspapers. For the music industry, this shift will surely mark the beginning of the end of the battle with Apple and, overnight of course, the battle with the file sharers.
August 27, 2006
Elstein loses it
Everybody says David Elstein is clever. I've met him once or twice and he's certainly an entertaining critic of TV and media in general – a real Maverick from outside the liberal public service media consensus. So it's disappointing to learn that he's turned into a silly old git. In this week's New Media Age we learn that he's convinced himself that the BBC's mission to give away its whole archive online will devalue content created by commercial rivals and encourage people to steal it. Likewise, I suppose, ITV's entirely free output encourages people to wander into Woolies and steal DVDs.
September 19, 2005
The Guardian Again
Speaking of The Guardian, I spent part of Wednesday afternoon in a private room at The Ivy, judging the web site category of the 26th annual Guardian Student Media Awards. As I did not fail to point out to everyone present, the last time I ate in that room was at a dinner thrown by Maurice Saatchi to celebrate his investment in my first Internet business, Webmedia, in 1995 (Ivan and I got more than a bit drunk, as far as I remember). Explaining this to the callow designer next me at Wednesday's lunch (he was judging Best Designed Student Publication) was tricky. He didn't quite believe that there could have been such a thing as a web design firm as long ago as 1995...
Media I have loved
Listen. I don't want to get all sentimental here but The Guardian has always been pretty important to me. My Mum & Dad – working class lefties and trade unionists of the old school (unless they're reading this, in which case they're the bastards who ruined my life) – brought me up on the Grauniad (and The Eye) and the family's dedication to the paper meant that, in the Seventies, when the paper hit a financial crunch and a merger with The Times was narrowly averted, my Mum bought two copies every day. How's that for loyalty?
Anyway, the 'Berliner' redesign is a thing of beauty and the proof is that all the other broadsheet-turned-tabloids now look grey and dowdy and lost. The Guardian, once again, trumps the lot. Well done, you lot! I can still remember the thrill and tension of the 1988 redesign and this one's better. I'm proud of you all. My friend Vic Keegan's minute-by-minute launch day blog is really thrilling.
As I've said before, the other thing my parents (those bastards!) did for me as a kid was force-feed me the BBC's most perfect offspring, Radio 4, so this moving celebration of 50 years of From Our Own Correspondent (you'll have to download this MP3 since the original has been overwritten now), presented by legendary contributor Charles Wheeler, practically had me weeping on the Edgware Road the other day. I remembered all but two or three of the voices featured and many of the actual reports.
July 11, 2005
Citizens censored?
Helen Boaden, the BBC's head of news, quoted in The Guardian, says that:
"Within minutes of the first blast we had received images from the public," says Boaden. "We had 50 images within an hour. Now there are thousands. We had a gallery of still photographs from the public online, and they were incredibly powerful."
Thousands? You wouldn't know it from BBC News Online's coverage. I can find maybe 25 in several different places at news.bbc.co.uk, most of which have been there for several days. What have they done with them all? Are they all sub-standard? Too graphic? Faked? Out of focus? I'd really like to know if there's a flood of images from citizen reporters dammed up behind the BBC's editorial code of practice.
I suppose it was inevitable
The Daily Mail's RSS feed is up so, you'll be happy to know, you can now read all about tidal waves of dirty immigrants, neighbours from hell, meddling bureaucrats and interesting new diseases in an aggregator of your choice.
May 31, 2005
Hitchens action
If Andrew Marr continues to produce Start The Weeks (MP3) of this quality on his departure from the big politics job at the Beeb it'll all be worth it. William Shawcross, Christopher Hitchens and Germaine Greer on great form. Speaking of Hitchens, you've got to read this mind-blowing double-interview: Christopher and his estranged brother Peter with The Guardian's Ian Katz at the Hay Festival (they also made it onto Today this morning). What a pair.
April 15, 2005
Murdoch gets religion (finally)
In 1995 I tried (for about ten minutes) to persuade Rupert Murdoch to give the keynote speech at the Internet World London conference that year. In my address book (which is a huge and largely pointless guide to what people's telephone numbers used to be) I've still got direct lines for his various PAs. Of course, that's as close as I got to Mr Murdoch back then. I might as well have been asking him to address 'Fruit World' or 'Top Hat Expo'... You see, Murdoch's purchase of pioneering ISP Delphi the year before fooled me into thinking that he might actually be interested in the Internet. He wasn't.
He is now, though. In a speech to a newspaper industry conference in the US Wednesday he called the Internet "a fast-developing reality we should grasp" and said "The trends are against us... so unless we awaken to these changes, which are quite different to those of five or six years ago, we will, as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans." So what's happened to finally get Mr. Murdoch's attention? Well, it could be the unstoppable expansion of the blogosphere or the arrival of RSS as a serious news distribution platform or – more likely – it could be the research he's commissioned that shows only 8% of 18-34s find newspapers useful. Ouch. The Newspaper publishers have got the fear because of the real possibility that their almost universal gradual decline (at least in Western economies) might turn into a collapse as the news-reading public ages. Could the newspapers turn out to be the Internet's first real Old Media victim?
February 24, 2005
New York & India
Rush out and buy these special issues before they disappear from the shelves at the end of the week: The Economist's terrific Survey of New York and New Scientist's comprehensive special on science in India. Both are outstanding – the best specialist journalism in Britain and lots of clever, exclusive content. Both mags are really on form, if you ask me.
The Economist's survey seems to be available for nothing at the web site and quite a lot of the New Scientist's special is also free online.
January 25, 2005
How to throw away a natural advantage
The UK cable TV business is a uniquely dysfunctional family, managing to marry epic individual clumsiness with the kind of domestic chaos that continually threatens to bring the whole family down. Having (nearly) overcome the decades of forced disarray produced by its origin in dozens of separate, local companies, the industry's getting ready for another gigantic misstep – this time into Video on Demand (VoD).
I suppose, when you own a broadband pipe into every one of your customer's homes, the logic of VoD must be pretty compelling. It must also be immensely frustrating that, so long after Sky's arrival in the UK, the satellite firm still owns the multichannel marketplace despite the complete absence of a return path, no way of delivering Internet access or a phone line and the unavoidable requirement to fix a nasty wart to the side of every home covered.
Cable's response to Sky's continued dominance, perhaps understandably, is to push ahead with the medium's natural advantage and try to make a go of VoD (you can't do VoD without a network infrastructure and a proper return path so Sky just can't play). There is, presumably, a point some time in the future when owning a fast, two-way data path into every home finally pays off and cable comes into its own but, as far as I can see, you'd need to be criminally naive to think that that time has arrived. This is still very much Sky's market and the service of the moment is not VoD (or even NVoD – Near Video on Demand – which is a big hit on both Sky and3 cable) but Sky Plus.
The complete failure of the cable firms to roll out their own Personal Video Recorder (PVR) is perhaps partially explained by the announcement of their VoD plans but VoD won't come close to competing with Sky Plus (or even my five year-old Tivo) any time soon. By contrast, building a PVR for cable would have been a piece of cake – the technology is straightforward, the manufacturers ready and waiting and the kit cheaper than it's ever been. Rolling out PVRs into the cable network would be no more difficult than distributing, say, a new generation of remote controls. There'd be no impact on the infrastructure and hardly any CapEx – just a marketing and admin cost plus maybe some investment in an improved EPG (although I'm sure the Tivo people would be quite happy to share theirs). Sky has even done half the marketing job already – everyone knows what a PVR is now ("you know, the thing that lets you rewind live telly").
So, instead of taking the easy win and, not incidentally, boosting ARPU by taking an extra couple of hundred quid a year from PVR subscribers, the cable industry has, once again, chosen the rocky road of rolling out a new and expensive technology into a resistant marketplace while Sky continues to sell PVRs like ice creams in August. Oy.
October 29, 2004
Remembering Peel
When you were a kid, did you record the Peel show? I did. Dozens and dozens of cassettes, all made – at least to begin with – by Sellotaping the crappy microphone from my cassette recorder to the crappy speaker of my Sanyo transistor radio. Of course, those cassettes are long gone (this is 25 years ago) but I bet you kept yours. You should dig them out, encode them and stick them on your weblog – that would be a good way of remembering him, wouldn't it?
October 22, 2004
Seeking smokers...
This sad-looking (and slightly out-of-focus) TV crew were standing in Carnaby Street lunchtime today and – I kid you not – as I passed them I heard the reporter say "Come on smokers". Who knows how long they'd been standing there waiting for an indignant smoker to interview about the impending Liverpool smoking ban but since nobody in London smokes any more, they'd obviously be better off jumping on a train up to Liverpool where, I understand, they're still smoking like chimneys.
October 18, 2004
Dandy lives
It definitely cheers me up to learn that The Dandy has not only survived for seven decades (longer than any other comic) but has now emerged confidently into the glossy covermount era. The old characters have been updated deftly and there are some pretty good new ones. Good covermounts too (a sticky rubber tomato this week. Can't argue with that).
August 26, 2004
Olympics and spectacle
TV still has the power to knock your socks off. I'm thinking about the Olympics, of course. Some people are probably calling this the 'red button' games (at least in Britain) but I reckon this has to be the games of the 'embedded' camera. Big, static cameras pointed at the action are obviously history. Now you run the camera on a little train along the bottom of the pool or down the ten metre tower and – splash – into the water with the divers or out into the Saronic Gulf lashed to a mast or perched – wobbling – on the high bar or velcro'd to the athlete's shorts as he wanders the village. The Olympic environment is studded with cameras (I wonder how many there are?) – it's like the benign flipside of the surveillance society. There are no dark corners any more.
Sport and spectacle have finally collided and it makes perfect sense. From now on the idea of competing for any prize without perfect 360°, hi-def coverage will just seem weird. And it can only get stranger and more intimate – the barriers are down and the technology is out of control. Biometrics and blood chemistry (real-time public drug testing – how's that for transparency?), downtime (Big Brother live from the Olympic Village). The coverage has been stretched in every direction – there's more of it and it goes closer to the action and to the personalities. Sports TV meets reality TV. The cameras will be everywhere and the athletes will have no refuge...
August 08, 2004
Admirable Things
The admirable Things Magazine has reached its tenth anniversary. I'm a recent convert (like thousands of people, I guess, by way of the equally good New Things linklog). You can buy a copy here and you can even use the PayPal credit you've been accumulating selling off all those... er... things in your attic. Things is clever. It looks like one of those wise-ass cultural/academic journals that thrived in the eighties and nineties but it's different. I think it's kind of 'post-theoretical', displaying the sort of hyper-engaged pleasure in the material world that was considered disreputable when I was reading this kind of thing, when 'theory' closed off practice and things were reduced to signs. Back then we deprecated the literal, physical world. You might have concluded it didn't exist at all, that it was just an 'effect' of the submerged sign-world we inhabited. Now we're all recovering our pleasure in the stuff that surrounds us and Things is here to celebrate it.
July 09, 2004
MP3 thoughts
The esteemed Phil Gyford just digitised a decade-and-a-half of radio recordings from audio cassette. That sounds like a public service to me – if he now feels able to feed that lot into a respectable P2P network I think he'll have markedly enriched the public domain and will surely one day get an MBE (Phil's advancement can't be far off now). Anyway, Phil's effort reminded me that I've always thought it would be a pretty neat business idea to buy a little van, paint it with a groovy logo and run around collecting people's vinyl record collections, digitising and returning them on nice firewire hard drives. The neat thing about this is that (copyright permitting – not a trivial matter), you'd be able to build a big 'stock' of digitised tunes as you encoded people's collections. Ultimately, you'd hardly need to actually encode anything – you'd just pull the track from stock. Anyone got a van?
July 05, 2004
$75M well spent
We saw our first blockbuster of the Summer this weekend – Shrek 2. A complete, delirious pleasure. What impresses me most about great Hollywood output like this is not so much the specific expression (which is very good) as the sheer ambition, the quite awesome unwillingness to compromise, to leave anything half done. Americans – when making movies, especially – really care. There's not a slack moment, not the tiniest slip in the commitment to creating a giant, unarguable aesthetic unity. You might not like the final product – you might even hate its obsessive and arch re-use of movie and TV history – but you can't argue with its life force.
• There's something depressing about the way British stars pack the cast list: in a huge creative enterprise like this, we're reduced to talent – support staff. We're constitutionally incapable of making anything so grand, so monumental. We apparently can't do epic – only cheeky, ironic, eccentric, cute (sometimes ugly, often amateurish). Once in a while I'd like to see us produce something really grand.
• Shrek 2's audience is pretty well-defined – in our 9:45 Sunday morning screening (only bleary-eyed parents and small children permitted) we saw four ads for identikit small MPVs (those 'flexible' slab-sided multi-seat mini-buses for young families): Toyota, Renault, Peugeot and... er... Mazda? All silver, by the way. Must be this season's colour...
June 26, 2004
Red button finally delivers...
Every now and then I press the red button on the remote – usually to be greeted by some kind of error or a 'nothing here yet' message (of course, this might have been different if we'd chosen Sky and not NTL). Tonight I pressed the red button and got live, full-screen coverage of Glastonbury, including a fine, rattling and clattering version of practically my favourite song in the whole world – The Velvet Underground's What Goes On – from a man called Tim Booth whose principle charm for me was that he looks like he might be about my age (only a bit thinner, obviously)... Apparently he used to be in James (it says here...)
June 15, 2004
Good radio
A couple of outstanding BBC Radio programmes – Lionel Kellaway's really thought-provoking Nature on the ecological value of so-called 'brownfield' land and the risks to the well-being of City dwellers of building over it (click here to listen to the show). Providing the five million or more new homes we need over the next twenty years is going to be more complicated than we thought. Magdi Abdelhadi's gorgeous half-hour about reciting the koran (don't think you can listen to this one online, though. How frustrating and wasteful for such important programming to disappear as soon as it's been broadcast).
May 30, 2004
Franz Schubert vs George Formby
This is why a public service broadcaster needs a stable online archive. A year ago I blogged a really lovely Radio 4 programme about Schubert's C major quintet and linked to the show's RealMedia stream. I assumed at the time that the stream would be overwritten in a week or so and, sure enough, if you follow the link now you'll hear a pretty good programme about George Formby (which will, itself, be overwritten by something else next week). Ten years into the Internet era this kind of license-fee funded vandalism can't be explained away. I hope the Thompson-era BBC will behave more like the guardian of an important national asset and promise not to trash gigabytes of valuable, accessible content every day (which really winds me up).
April 23, 2004
Big journalism
Vintage Vanity Fair this month (May). Great pity you can't get this stuff online (can you?) – you'll have to buy a copy. Dominick Dunne forgives Martha Stewart (he's a friend of hers and attended the whole trial); Bryan Burrough, Evgenia Peretz, David Rose and David Wise closely examine the gruesome Bush administration's rush to war in Iraq (the kind of really big feature only a heavyweight like VF can afford – four top journalists for seven months plus Beltway expenses and some amazing photographs of the grim-faced war cabinet taken shortly after 9/11. What's that? $200,000? $300,000?); Michael Wolff scores an unlikely interview with Disney's Michael Eisner (having previously compared him to both Michael Jackson and General Franco) and Christopher Hitchens skewers Ralph Nader's obsession with sabotaging Democratic Presidential hopes (looks like he's getting ready to do it again this time round).
April 11, 2004
The Neurotic Doctor
Doctor Seuss is the opposite of the tradition of lovable hedgerow creatures, talking pets and mildly rebellious schoolboys in British literature for young kids. He's a neurotic A. A. Milne, an uptight Kenneth Grahame. There's nothing sunny or light-hearted about Seuss. All those dark, placeless landscapes and stringy, demented characters of indeterminate sex (and species) are straight from a Freudian case study. This is prickly mid-twentieth century angst, about as cuddly as an ironing board.
The latest Seuss movie is excellent – Myers is a superb Cat, art direction and photography translate Seuss-land into a properly nightmarish pastel suburbia and the gags are good – but there's a nasty normative thing going on here – something I don't remember from the book. The movie's pay-off is essentially a 'Cuckoo's Nest'-style reprogramming for Sally and Conrad (the bored kids horrified and entertained by the Cat and his sidekicks-from-the-subconscious Thing 1 and Thing 2) – only without the electric shocks.
The Cat's loopy, irresponsible behaviour doesn't set the kids free, loosen the bonds of convention, show them how to have fun or any of that child-centred stuff. Quite the opposite – it translates Sally and Conrad – 'control freak' and 'rule breaker' respectively, according to the Cat's 'phun-o-meter' – into a matched pair of smiling Stepford kids with a phun-o-meter reading of 'just right'. This Cat is a nasty surrogate dad for the Bush era. Pity.
Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian doesn't like The Cat and says so in verse. What Doctor Seuss Really Taught Us – a lovely piece by Louis Menand from The New Yorker about The Cat as Cold Warrior – “The mother has left, and she's never coming back. It's just us and that goddam cat.”.
April 01, 2004
The future summarised
I've been meaning to blog this for ages. I've been subscribing for a few years to a 'monthly abstract of books, articles and reports concerning forecasts, trends and ideas about the future' from a serious-minded (but appropriately kookie) outfit called The World Future Society. Future Survey is a dreary-looking two-column newsletter with a slightly cheesy 'futuristic' 1970s masthead design, no colour, no editorial, no ads and no illustrations – just capsule synopses of books, magazine articles and TV programmes about the future. It ought to be pretty dry (the kind of thing you used to find right at the back of your University Library until they wised up and stopped buying the stuff nobody read) but editor Michael Marien somehow makes it pithy and entertaining. Really, this is one of those marginal publications that really makes me glad – a labour of love and a fantastically useful resource that hardly anyone knows about.
March 17, 2004
Following the wrong leader
Peter Preston in The Observer on the 'compact revolution' in newspaper publishing. I'm pretty sure this is the beginning of the end for broadsheet newspapers (although they'll take a decade to die) and I'm interested to note that serial innovator The Guardian has decided not to visit planet tabloid any time soon but I think the fact that the same paper has apparently stumbled on an online publishing model that might just work is actually much more important in the long run. As I keep saying, The Guardian's 'digital edition' is a genuine innovation, works beautifully and – remarkably – might even coexist (for the time being) with the paper's continuing free online version. While copying The Independent and rushing out tabloid editions probably makes short term sense for Murdoch et al, copying The Guardian's digital strategy will almost certainly be more important in the future (yes, that's Andrew Neil rubbing his hands over the Guardian's compact dilemma in The Scotsman and Brian MacArthur in The Times).
Tivo has landed
We've adopted a second-hand Tivo (why don't the cable companies launch their own PVR? What's wrong with them? Do they like being kicked around by Sky?). PVRs are supposed to change your life. Ours is weaving its strange magic in ways we didn't expect: if the Tivo's busy recording something, we'll politely sit down and watch until it's finished (rude to interrupt). We now routinely watch Seinfeld straight after the morning school run (very decadent). The kids want to know why we can't fast forward live TV. Yesterday we recorded a documentary about head lice (because we could)...
March 07, 2004
Transport issues in post oil-crisis urban policing in the United States
Important journalism from Miranda Sawyer in The Guardian (the paper that reliably tackles the big issues). I hate to quibble but, even when I was a kid, everybody knew that Starsky's Ford Gran Torino wasn't a real muscle car, just cheesy product placement from the wrong side of the oil crisis (by the way, check out the disclaimer about the new S&H movie at the Gran Torino site).
February 12, 2004
The really big deal
I know a lot of you come here for straightforward, unbiased advice on what to do with your next $66 billion so here's my angle on the Comcast Disney offer: they're on drugs. Executives in big media firms are addicted to the buzz of the epic deal. Do we not have enough case studies of failed mega media mergers? More to the point, what's the success rate of mergers that produce vertically-integrated media giants? Sony and Columbia, AOL and Time Warner, Time Warner and Turner, Vivendi and Universal (and dozens of smaller but equally ill-starred deals) were all sold to shareholders on the promise of producing new value by hooking together content and distribution.
None created appreciable value – in fact, most destroyed truckloads of shareholders' money in short order – some of these deals have turned healthy businesses into basket cases. The fact that the engineers of these deals continue to produce the same discredited justifications – Comcast CEO Brian Roberts says: "There is no doubt these two companies can achieve things together that neither is able to do on their own" – says more about the irresistible glamour of the really big deals than about their commercial logic.
Some people don't agree: Business Week, Forrester. Lex in the FT lays out some defense strategies for Disney (subscription required).
A bloated Lear
Without the distractions of Hutton and the BBC's self-immolation we'd probably all have been paying more attention to the Shakespearian Conrad Black saga. Black is an appalling figure. Decades of cringing deference and unaccountable power have turned him into a bloated Lear, raging against the ingratitude of his shareholders and erstwhile friends – many of whom he is now suing (pursuing the metaphor a bit too far, maybe, he even has his own, twisted Cordelia in scary wife Barbara Amiel). It's too much to hope that Black's wheel of fire will change him as it did Lear, 'adjusting his attitude' as they say. A wiser and gentler Lord Black of Crossharbour would certainly be an interesting outcome.
Incidentally, what do the people of the Isle of Dogs think about Black's adoption of Crossharbour as location for his made-up estate? Do they think it makes him seem pompous and arrogant or do they just laugh at the absurdity of locating your estate amongst run-down council estates and unusable business premises.
Stephanie Kirchgaessner's long piece in Tuesday's FT was excellent (but you'll need to be a subscriber to see it) and The Guardian has a pretty good overview page and a handy timeline.
February 03, 2004
The best way to read 10,000 word reviews online?
So I renewed my NYRB subscription and this time I went for the cheaper electronic subscription. This will make me feel a bit better about not reading it (and there'll be no reproachful pile of nicely-bagged newsprint to remind me). If I could get the NYRB through the admirable interface of The Guardian's new Digital Edition I might actually read it, though. It would make the fortnightly's often dense and always very long reviews much more accessible if I could spread the paper out on The Guardian's giant dining room table, flick through the issue page-by-page and click to enlarge David Levine's illustrations. The same applies to dozens of other titles. I'm serious about this. The guys at The Guardian should pitch their Digital Edition to other publishers – it'd be a huge hit.
January 26, 2004
Ordinary licence fee-payer maxes out BBC
Crazy economics you got there. The more people that listen, the more it costs you – up to your server licence limit, of course. Illustrates potentially loony outcomes of on-demand media distribution and makes quite a good argument for the retention of the broadcast model.
January 21, 2004
Gaming eMusic
Here's a good game. See how many albums you can get within your 40 track per month download limit over at eMusic. It hadn't occurred to me, of course, but eMusic members have already started to pass around their lists of 'albums with really long tracks' and '1- and 2-track albums'. Looks like there's no reason why you shouldn't keep downloading 40 albums per month – provided you have a taste for prog rock, pretentious jazz and obscure classical.
January 20, 2004
A new standard for online news?
So I've been living with The Guardian's Digital Edition for a few weeks and I'm even more convinced. It really is the first good analogue for a real newspaper I've come across. I would seriously consider dropping the printed paper for this. I'm inspired because I'd sort of concluded that this would never happen. The best thing about it is that I can almost literally flick through it, reproducing exactly my (probably highly inefficient) daily newspaper habits if I want to, but also making the paper markedly more accessible by giving me the equivalent of the biggest kitchen table in the world to spread the papers out on (plus a pretty good search function).
Of course, whether The Guardian could actually make money from a digital edition is still up in the air but I reckon there must be some mileage in selling this as a service to other publishers. In fact, if I could add a bunch of other publications to my giant kitchen table and flick through them in the same way I would probably sign up on the spot. A new pop-up menu in the left-hand nav could bring up digital editions of all my favourites – especially the ones that currently have dreadful or non-existent web sites. In fact, I think even quite competent online periodicals like The Economist or The New Statesman or New Scientist could benefit from the Guardian's approach. They'd all be improved by a dose of the giant kitchen table treatment. The Guardian might find that they're sitting on an emerging standard for the presentation of printed publications online. Wouldn't that be cool?
January 10, 2004
Davies gets his retaliation in first
Meaty and coherent preemptive strike from BBC Chairman Gavyn Davies on Hutton (although last minute delays to the report may make it a bit more preemptive than intended). You'll need an ft.com subscription to read this (for you foreigners: a judge, Lord Hutton, is conducting an enquiry into the circumstances of the death of a Ministry of Defence weapons expert fingered as a BBC source. Here's The Guardian's Hutton backgrounder).
January 06, 2004
A proper innovation from The Guardian
I've finally got around to trying The Guardian's digital edition and I've got to tell you it is absolutely brilliant. In fact, I think it might be the first proper innovation in online newspapers since – ooh – well, the web I suppose (is that overdoing it? Can you think of anything else?).
It sounds like it shouldn't work: shrunken JPEG facsimiles of every page in the print edition with simple left-to-right navigation and headlines pulled out and presented to the right. Clicking on a headline or on a story from within the page itself loads the text of the story which you can, of course, cut-and-paste or print. Not a plug-in or frame or gnarly proprietary doodad in sight.
It's all in the execution, though – it's just seriously slick and satisfying. There really is hardly a wrinkle in the UI – and there's presumably some pretty heavy-duty inegration with production systems humming away under the hood – not bad for a beta. Everything works as it should. The structure of the physical newspaper is retained and, to my surprise, really works online. It makes ft.com look bloated and inaccessible and the other UK papers are obviously years behind. I think this is the first online paper that might actually persuade me to stop getting the print edition. Simon Waldman, Emily Bell and their team should be proud of themselves (Emily Bell, editor in chief of Guardian Unlimited, writes about their plans for the product, pricing etc. here).
January 05, 2004
I think I invented Reality TV
At the end of 1996 I made a presentation to a TV conference and I filled it with screenshots from a new webcam site that everyone was talking about called Jennicam. I told the conference that I was pretty sure we'd soon see lots of TV shows influenced by web sites like Jennicam and that we were all going to have to get used to watching people eating, scratching and shouting at each other on primetime TV.
Jennifer Ringley, Jennicam's creator and sole star, became pretty famous because she left her webcam (seven of them, in the end) running twenty-four hours a day and didn't seem to mind people watching her watching the TV, cleaning her teeth, plagiarising her college essays and (mostly) sleeping. Anyway, according to Silicon.com, Jennicam is no more – killed off by Paypal's policies on web site nudity.
December 08, 2003
Adbusting or whingeing? You decide
Consumer activism is a good thing (don't get me wrong), especially when it takes a street-wise, media hacking, spray-paint-and-stencil kind of approach, but – really – this is just whingeing isn't it?
November 27, 2003
Fast track elf
At the weekend – while you were translating Artaud or arranging a Bartok quartet for the tuba or whatever you do with your free time – we went to see Elf. We laughed and sobbed like sentimental goons (the kids weren't so keen). A proper Xmas movie. Anyway, I looked the movie up and learnt that the (very funny) screenplay is written by David Berenbaum, who got his start in Hollywood less than three years ago when Disney took him into their writers in residence programme after they saw his brilliant Shalom Whassup spoof. This says a lot about the way Hollywood renews itself and about the American attitude to new ideas and new people. Could Britfilm provide the same kind of fast track for real talent?
October 21, 2003
Ouch
When I said that Carltonada shareholders might be happy for Allen and Green to spend a little more time with their families, I definitely didn't expect it all to kick off quite so soon. A shareholder scorned... The ITV landscape is going to look very different in a few months time. Cue Elstein?
October 14, 2003
Media overthrow still imminent
Over in Medialand it's business as usual. The Telegraph has a new editor (yawn!), Carlton and Granada are to be allowed to merge (did you hear Allen and Green's surprisingly plausible double act on the Today programme?). David Liddiment in The Guardian is worried – implausibly – about ignorant Americans with no understanding of public service broadcasting blundering in and irreperably damaging the fragile UK broadcast ecology. I say 'implausibly' because he seems to think that European broadcasters might make a better fist of it (Ah, Signor Berlusconi. So nice to see you!). Most people are assuming that the Carltonada duo will be spending more time with their families pretty soon.The prize for the most conspicuous waste of money has to go to the The Tories who spent a hundred grand on a Media Makeover for their increasingly hapless leader. Wouldn't it be ironic if IDS lost his job before Tony Blair?
Meanwhile, though, the geeks and indie media guerillas are plotting the end of the old-fashioned top-down media as we know it – it's just that they're doing it in such a diffident, cerebral way that the old-fashioned top-down media might never notice. Doing the rounds in London this week are kooky Douglas Rushkoff (who wants to overthrow old-fashioned top-down religion while he's at it) and less kooky Cameron "Blogdex" Marlow. At a 'brown bag' seminar ("what? No shrimps on sticks?") at The Work Foundation's gorgeous Carlton House Terrace hang-out last week, top blogger Tom Coates, Marlow and a handful of others quietly and in the sort of complicated, hedged and precise language that only techies and scientists use, laid out a kind of partial, modest first draft manifesto for a democratic, open and... er... bottom-up post-weblog media (only they wouldn't have been so pretentious as to have called it that).
It was really quite exciting but you'd have to have been listening very carefully to get it. James "The Chairman" Crabtree wrote it up in detail.
September 18, 2003
Keeping track of your favourite newspaper columnists
I feel I should point out that Mr. Gyford's Byliner just gets more awesome and probably ought to be my permament browser homepage. Why hasn't someone snapped it up and added it to their site – someone like The Guardian, for instance? Are you listening, Simon?
September 17, 2003
Going to Cambridge?
I'm going to be at the RTS's Cambridge Media Convention on Friday 19 September. The event looks fascinating. Let me know if you're going.
September 15, 2003
Hallmark to bid for ITV?
It says here, in a pretty good scoop for Andrew Neil's The Business (they don't seem to have a web site, though), that David Elstein � top broadcasting wit, former Chief Exec at Channel 5 and general scourge of wooly, public service nostalgia � has secured the backing of the Hallmark Corporation (yes, that Hallmark) for a speculative bid for the soon-to-be-merged ITV.
I can't help thinking this is probably a good thing. Hallmark may be weird, 'family-oriented' and about as American as Apple Pie but it's also an extraordinarily well-run company, a big investor in original content and one of the few big firms with the free cash to fund a frankly risky deal like this.
If it turns out to be a kite flying exercise or it just falls apart I think it'll be a pity � Elstein is inventive and aggressive and with some American money he could really shake up mainstream UK TV.
The Guardian picked up the story this morning.
August 07, 2003
Carter, got
He's in post, seems to know roughly what's going on (260 duties on his to do list), writes nicely (or at least his press office does) and he has a fair wind (few new regulators can have been so well received and Ofcom's parliamentary birth could hardly have been easier). Stephen Carter, first Chief Executive of Ofcom, marks the end of the beginning for the new regulator in The Guardian.I'll be at Damian Tambini's symposium on the Communications Act in Oxford later today. I'll let you know if my optimism about the new regulator survives the day.
August 01, 2003
Telly events
Are you planning to go to either the Edinburgh TV Festival 22–24 August or to the RTS's Cambridge Convention 18–20 September? If you are, drop me a line.Spoiler shame? Not really.
David Liddiment knows his stuff (and his column is one of the several very good reasons to buy Media Guardian Mondays) but he's reading the BBC's mission through the distorting lens of a career in commercial TV. Liddiment says that the BBC shouldn't run spoilers to obviously commercial programmes on ITV (his example is Fame Academy against Pop Idol on Saturday night).It's obviously not the BBC's job to rob the commercial channels of ad revenue by trashing their big shows but the alternative is too ugly to think about. A BBC that politely shrinks from primetime competition to leave the field open for the harried ad-funded outfits will quickly lose audience, currency and relevance.
The Beeb's programmers know that, far from being incompatible with the charter, fierce competition in the mainstream is the only meaningful defense for a licence fee increasingly under fire.
Stop press: Liddiment just made a spectacular comeback to TV – he and two other old ITV execs just bought Chrysalis TV.
July 11, 2003
Don't prejudge the Comms Bill
Richard Tait in the FT (subscription required) says we shouldn't be too quick to predict the long term outcomes of the Comms Bill. After all, ten years ago:
“...you could have got eye-watering odds betting that six years after channel Five’s launch it would be a major broadcaster of arts and history programmes; that its first chairman Greg Dyke would be running the BBC; that its first director of programmes Dawn Airey would be in charge of programming at BSkyB; and that her successor Kevin Lygo would be everyone’s favourite to take over as director of television at Channel 4.”
Tait, who used to be Editor in Chief at ITN and is now an academic, is a pretty good reason to buy the FT on a Tuesday when his column appears in the Creative Business section.
July 10, 2003
Top media people
I feel obliged to link to The Guardian's MediaGuardian 100, even if only for the old outboard brain, but I also have to link to Russ Taylor's commentary. He's an American so UK media looks pretty weird to him.
July 07, 2003
Last week's media news today!
I'm a week behind (blame recent sleep deprivation) but there were some really good articles in last Monday's Media Guardian. David Liddiment, who used to be in charge of programming at ITV, has got public service religion and provides a useful insider's view of the pros and cons of arts programming for mainstream channels. He doesn't have to worry about picking winners any more so he can afford to say things like this:
“For as long as mainstream broadcasting survives, it should not be possible again for the BBC to abandon its cultural responsibilities on its main channel. Charter renewal lobbyists please note. As for ITV, Channel 4 and Five, I believe they will find it increasingly difficult to keep arts programmes worthy of the name as part of a commercially viable schedule. Sooner or later someone will have to look again at the trade-off between a rich and varied TV diet and the bounty that broadcasters pay the treasury for their privileged access to spectrum.”In the same issue, terrifically brainy Tim Gardam looks back over his five years doing the same job at Channel 4. He is most proud of Big Brother:
“He recalls his happiest moment: the last night of the first Big Brother in August 2000. “I thought, 'Whatever happens now, I have done something.'”.
June 03, 2003
All rise...
I'm judging Milverton Wallace's European Online Journalism Awards again so, if you've been short-listed, this is your opportunity to invite me to travel to your beautiful city and put me up in your most prestigious hotel for a week or two. Think of it as an investment.
April 29, 2003
Britain's biggest flow chart magazine?
What's a flow chart? "A method for showing how information flows around a system using stylised boxes and arrows which show the direction of flow?". "A pictorial summary that shows with symbols and words the steps, sequence, and relationship of the various operations involved in the performance of a function or a process?" No. You fool. It's a teen craze!
(click the little picture for the whole cover of Mizz Flowchart Magazine)
April 08, 2003
Radio stars
To unlovely Shoreditch via lovely Liverpool Street Station with its disfiguring retail warts (the station concourse and train shed remain beautiful but only if you hold up your hand to block out the ghastly sediment of Sock Shops and Soup Shacks up to about first floor level) to meet Matt Hall (pictured), head of radio for Somethin' Else and Tamsin Hughes, top radio producer, to talk about... a radio programme. What else?
Somethin' Else is a success story of the post-independent-production-quota broadcast landscape. Despite the economic slowdown and the recent dot.com unpleasantness the firm still produces hundreds of hours of TV and radio for the Beeb and other outlets (including British Airways jets). They're responsible, for example, for one of the BBC's biggest external commissions, Jazz on 3 and for Channel 4's Black Like Beckham.
April 07, 2003
Word out (but not up)
Word is a worthy and probably doomed attempt to tackle books, cinema, music, art... everything really... for literate middle-brows in one monthly magazine. It's the first project from the stellar Development Hell team, edited by Mark Ellen and with all sorts of top names popping up throughout: David Quantick, Paul du Noyer, John Naughton. It's even brainy enough to need a New Yorker-style front cover flap for extra copy lines and tasters.
I wish the mag well but they must get some kind of story archive onto the web sharpish. There's enough clever, topical, unpretentious writing here to produce a lot of inbound traffic from thousands of media junkie bloggers and, these days, that could make all the difference between a hit and yet another sad fourth issue closure.
March 27, 2003
Tait on Puttnam's rebellion
Richard Tait in FT Creative Business on the likely parliamentary clash over media ownership rules and the so called 'Murdoch Clause'. Written before Lord Puttnam announced his intention to oppose "in every respect" the relaxation of the rules designed to permit Sky to buy Five (link to Tait's article requires FT.com subscription or a free trial).
March 11, 2003
Total Information Washout
This week's Bowbrick at Large in The Guardian is about the broken dreams of the Internet advertising business. For about ten minutes back in what we'll one day remember as the dawn of Internet time, the big advertisers – the pre-eminent engines of the 'old' economy – dreamt of perfect data. Their consultants and gurus had convinced them that the net's potential was to build huge, detailed, cross-matched databases of the likes, dislikes, clicks and IDs of every customer and potential customer they'd ever encounter on the Internet.
Of course, in one way, they were dead right. That is precisely the potential of any suitably interconnected network of computers. In another – the important one – they were wholly wrong. They, like millions before them (and presumably millions after them), argued solely from the potential of the technology, totally ignoring its context. Actually doing business on the net – trying to build and deploy these databases in the real world – turned out to be a minefield littered with bear traps surrounded by quicksand. Impossible.
Every one of the projects to build big, integrated databases of personal information has either failed or been radically scaled back (Doubleclick, Engage...). Consumers, web site owners and investors rejected the collection and cross-matching of web site data outright. Billions of pounds of shareholder value have been destroyed, thousands of jobs lost. The Total Information Internet was a washout.
March 10, 2003
Digital radio's revenge
Top media analyst Mathew Horsman says Cinderella media technology DAB may yet thrive but it could do so at the cost of the 3G operators. You need to subscribe to FT.com to see the article (I think – try it!).
March 06, 2003
Barry Cox on broadcast
The