Presuming to Criticise the Great Oz

Is he a very bad man, or just a good man who's been a very bad wizard? MP's added a session to their schedules to hail the morrow, as after travelling all the way from, er, Oz, Rupert Murdoch, who does not instinctively do humility, announced that Tuesday was the most “humble” day of his life. A new message is coming through loud and clear — “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” This and the truth of Corporal Jones‘ immortal observation “They don’t mind dishin’ it out, but they don’t like it up the rear.”

This is a critical turning point for everyone. For years we have all believed in a monolithic puissant Behemoth called “The Media.” The power that drove its steely flanks was terrible and swift, and derived from owning the means of production — Scott's old joke about a free press in England, as long as you happen to own a press. Now we all own a press, and carry it around in our pockets, and if we don’t like Mr Murdoch and his works he may not listen, but he can't prevent us expressing ourselves, or manipulate the stories we tell without us being able to do anything about it. His value came from a monopoly on the means of production, and that monopoly is busted.

The digital reformation that drives this change has been afoot for a long time. Ironically the Murdoch Bunker in Wapping is a concrete monument to its first wave, when, three decades ago, he rode into town on the tail of Eddie Shah and cleared out old Fleet Street of its quaint Spanish Practices. Now his empire is as obsolete as the older order it displaced. Mr Murdoch has even more humble days to come, no doubt.

As dramatic and iconic as the NI tale may be, don’t let's obsess on Mr Murdoch. For a start, as Rebekah Brooks hinted darkly on Tuesday, the word on the street was that other titles have behaved equally, if not more, unethically than the News of the World. Her attempt to suggest the Home of Dity Tricks was the Observer hardly stacked up, when everybody knows the Daily Mail has led the ruthless pack. The principle holds, however, that the scope of this deflation is far broader than just NI.

So what wll the news title of the future look like, and how will hacks make a living? I suggest, ont heir wit, like they always did. Human beings have an insatiable appetite for words and information — they just don't want it controlled by unaccountable Big Beasts. The market will segment into a variety of models, of which the Huffington Post and Financial Times seem to represent two. HP draws in writing talent from wherever and aggregates it, whilst the FT contains information that’s actually worth the money for its (specialised) audience.

What of the Murdoch staff? They have various dates down the station, whilst the politicians gyrate to dodge the bullets flying around this story. There is a global dimension, of course, given the 9/11 hacks if for no other reason. There is the question of compensation to 9,000 victims who may not feel as obliging and negotable as the first handful did when Rebekah Brooks paid them off, thinking, she says, they were the only ones.

As to the Dinosaur press, I have a Times sub, but if I'm honest must confess I seldom bother to download it any more. It's a reasonable production and I can look back to half a dozen articles this year I have much valued but frankly I find the whining editorial tone, the monochrome thinking and narrow selectivity of narratives the paper brings to every issue boring, lifeless and mediochre. I wade through a load of padding to get to a few nuggets of gold, when my browser would find me stuff I actually wanted to read in a fraction of the time, free to boot. So I keep the subscription going out of a blend of guilt and optimism, but my heart's not in it.

You may say that I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one. The future will be different, and I for one will not miss the former contents of the crumpled and deflated green robes over in the corner.

Hacked off or up? News International

One day crisis management textbooks will analyse the flurry on the bridge of News International this weekend. As truth everybody suspected but nobody could pin down slowly emerges, rubbing its eyes, NI’s whole strategy — lying and deceit with an occasional tub to the whale — is increasingly feeling like Niedergang if not Götterdämmerung.

The News of the World closure was a desperate attept at damage limitation, and the question for Ttanic watchers everywhere will have to be whether, in the present media environment, the watertight doors within the ship can hold against increasing water pressure.

This week has seen the dramatic slamming of a big watertight door on the biggest section on board, a title that in its glory days could boast the largest English language circulation on earth. As hapless hacks drown in their section, many of them are bound to harbour less than kindly thoughts towards the Cap’n on the bridge and his senior officers.

They are, after all, the people who went down there to clean everything up after the Glenn Mulcaire hacking scandal of 2006. René Girard says that wherever human beings gather there is an inexorable scapegoat script at work, but why them? They were the good guys. Well, Monsieur Girard would say, in a real scapegoat script the good guys always do get it in the neck.

There was a simple commercial logic to closing the News of the Screws. The brand was sinking fast, as advertisers bailed out, feeling rather slimed by its behaviour. Some of them may be unintelligent enough to think a Sun on Sunday would be wildly different. Many will suspect this is a case of change the name and do the same again.

Conspiracy theories abound. One journalistic friend told me yesterday that the whole thing could be a strategy to confuse investigators by closing down a crime scene. Another explained Murdoch never gets it wrong and was looking for a way out of this particular medium as its circulation wilted, along with that of all conventional dinosaur powermedia.

Well, I don’t know. I do know that as the Police swoop on Andy Coulson and Clive Goodman the position of Rebekah Brooks becomes increasingly untenable. Here is a good and gifted journalist whose newsroom was apparently perpetrating some 4,000 crimes over a few years, the principal evidence for which was the content of stories being published every week. Yet she asks us to believe she, unlike her four million readers, knew nothing. Where on earth did she think all those revelations were coming from. Mystic Meg?

As to the rest of News Internatonal they have just, James Murdoch tells us, given the police evidence of serious wrongdoing down the years. Where did that come from? If they had it why did they not give it to the police earlier? Or even read it themselves and do anything about it apart from shooting the sergeant? The News Internatonal brand is certainly rotten from the head down and nobody outside the organisation yet knows how far down the rot reaches.

Although I have had other things to do with my Sundays down the years, I shall miss the Screws. Its cheeky chappie antics were essentially end-of-the-pier stuff, although politicians quivered before its chickenshit right wing hufflepuff, and that of the Sun, in all kinds of subtle and no-so-subtle ways. Shame on them that they walked in fear of it, but that can hardly be blamed entirely on the papers. Big media used to be very powerful, we all believed.

There is a sting in the tail, like the final scene of Roman Polanski’s Night of the Vampires, where the nubile miss he has rescued from all the vampires in Transylvania bites the vampire slayer. Readers of Flat Earth News will remember Neil Davies section on this kind of carry on, in which he reveals that the involvement of the Daily Mail in such dark arts was, in the teeming summer of such behaviour, probably more extensive than that of News Internatonal Titles.

Yesterday’s Mail openly defied the Fleet Street convention that dogs never eat other dogs. Its headline crowed over the demise of “The Newspaper that Died of Shame.” This could be the Acme of the Daily Mail’s famous hypocrisy. The soft but insistent niff of rotten rat in its own basement is better concealed, but no less inherently pungent.

Save Politicians from Dole Queue

General Election Day. Politicians have been trying to convince us this is a grave day of decision for most of the populace, who, by and large, seem to feel it isn’t, really. It’s a matter of articulating distinctive selling points against the backdrop of a large public narrative, fuelled by expenses scandals and media cynicism, that says “they’re all the same.”

This is especially hard to do with a voting system which, as the Electoral Reform Society points out it, produces 600,000 players and an audience of 25,000,000. 600,000 people happen to live in marginal seats, so they get a real election, complete with politicians who take them serously, whilst the other 25 million of us, merely watch the floats go by. 385 seats are a done deal before the show begins. The only political animal 95% of us can aspire to be is a sheep:

You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to see that, however exciting this may all be for the lucky 600,000, the other 25 million shuffle in their seats.

All politicans agree people ought to get out and vote, and profess dismay at the way turnout has collapsed over the past twenty years and among the young. If they mean what they say, an alien inquirer might wonder, why not do the obvious and bring the disenfranchised 25 million onto the stage? It’s not rocket science.

Or perhaps it is

1. Changing the voting system means turkeys voting for Christmas. Why would they? The present system suits the political nomenklatura, because it creates a landscape they can manage without much reference to ordinary people. So we have a burgeoning professional political class that squashes its personal discretion and conviction in order to keep on message. It’s the price of power. Anyway, it would be a fearful bore and rather expensive to engage with 44 million. It’s as much as they can do to talk to 600,000.
   
   
2. Furthermore the present system means politicans sometimes lose, but it’s worth sticking with the game because only by doing so can you win it. And when your turn comes, Bingo! you can live for five years in bright sunlit uplands where you don’t have to listen to or take other politicians seriously, let alone the public.
   
   
3. This leads to rather unresponsive government. To give just one example someone mentioned to me this week, against the clear opposition of 60% of the population you can start an illegal war that kills half a million innocent civilians. Legitimacy is a vague, slippery concept. It won’t lose you an election.

Meanwhile, one thing that has well and truly got our daughter Steph’s goat is the Sun’s take on the election — especially one story yesterday that showed 16 Page Three models pleading “Save these girls from Dole Queue.” This did not sound like the kind of thing a nice little bishop should be scanning, but in the interests of political esearch, and finding out what the best selling newspaper in Britain has to say for itself, I pressed on.

I am a doctor.

SIXTEEN Page 3 Girls in all their glory represent the very image of freedom in this country. But if Labour or the Lib Dems win the election, this could be the last time they are allowed to pose together.

The “True Blue 16 Beauties” had, unfortunately, done their usual thing and forgotten to get dressed yesterday morning. They excoriate Labour and Liberal democrat politicians for questioning Mr Murdoch’s soft porn habit, and warn that if he managed to tame it

at a stroke the very liberties that put the Great into Great Britain will be torn asunder. The radical ideas of the 17th-century philosopher John Locke helped shape our freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights and, later, America's Constitution

Scary stuff. One of the girls, Poppy, explains:

The basis of Lockean thought is his theory of the Contract of Government, under which all political power is a trust for the benefit of the people. His thinking underpins our ideas of national identity and society

Poppy’s words call into serious question Locke’s observation (in the Essay concerning human understanding) “that in bare naked perception the mind is, for the most part, only passive.” If Poppy does end up in the dole queue, it won’t be long before a University Philosphy Department snaps her up. Lecturers get the kind of regular salaries that will enable her to buy herself some nice clothes, including, perhaps, some underwear. So what’s the Sun trying to say to us? “You don’t have to be a Dirty Old Man to vote Tory, but it helps?” Now that is off message...

Google doodle doo

Image via CrunchBase

This week has seen continued salvoes exchanged between the Rupert Murdoch Empire and Google about the Mikado’s plans to charge for his titles. He’s quite entitled, of course, to do charge anything he wants, and the rest of us are quite entitled to decide whether or not we want to pay. I have to say, on present showing, I am unlikely to cough up.

I personally doubt, apart from one or two cherries like, say the Times Law Reports, there’s much in the Murdoch stable for which specialists would care to pony up. I see I’ve accessed a (free) Murdoch site 17 times in the past month. Would I have bothered if I’d had to pay? Quite honestly not. I think I do find talk about Google “poaching” advertising somewhat arrogant, as though Dinosaur media had some kind of divine right to advertising revenue regardless of the laws of commerce. What might get me along to the party could be extraordinary content. Attempts to bully me into the deal aren’t attractive...

So, by way of riposte, I caught a wonderful Google poem on Saturday Live BBC Radio 4 this morning, on my way to a meeting in Wycombe. It’s by Matt Harvey, wonderful poerformance poet. It fitted into the context of an item about Gilbert and Sullivan, and an interview with Sarah Speake, Industry Leader for Technology at Google. So, here goes, Mr Murdoch:

A Google Poem

What's a google, Daddy?
Well, Son, I'm glad you asked:

It’s a sifter, filter, searcher
cyber guide and cyber Sherpa
all the world’s a google library
does it frighten me? Just slightly

It used to be a noun, son,
but it turned into a verb,
There is nothing you can't google,
Google cattle, Google poodle,
human folly, human foible
Google Babel, Google Breughel.

It shows you things your life is duller than,
Google Gilbert, Google Sullivan,
Shows you what’s for Google free,
for Google sale, and Google rental,
Shows things you shouldn’t Google see
It's so non judge-Google-mental,

Daddy, can we Google Google?
So we did. And there were oodles,
Google shopping, analytics,
Google earth and google physics,

Google info, Google-mation
Google dream interpretation,
Google gosh gorblimey crikey,
Google probing Google psyche,

So to return to your original question,
Google is a bit more than a search engine
And a bit less than a sentient life form
Taking over the world, we hope?

Cretaceous-Tertiary time for papers?

Two straws in the gale blowing round media and new media, both pointing in the same direction, and one’s blown away:

The Reader’s Digest has filed for bankruptcy in the US. This may be about the reinvention of the dentist’s waiting room as much as anything else, but RD lives on the sheves of second hand book dealers around the world in the form of conedensed books. I haven’t read one in years, and associated the brand primarily with prize draws to sell subscriptions back in the eighties. However it was a great brand in its day, and had a faithful and sizeable following — at 8·2 million considerably larger than anything on the UK print media scene. In June it had prudently revised its guaranteed circ figure to 5·5 million, with worse to come.

RD was the Google newsfeed of 1922, and it certainly soared in its prime. Over 75’s will take a cup of kindness yet for the sake of “humor in uniform” or “laughter is the best medicine?” RD’s radical restructing / demise shows the intensity of the winds of change sweeping through print media. It may be that the magazine died by becoming too comfortably embedded in its clientele. Reinvention is a necessity, not an option.

Anecdotally, five years ago I took stock of a carriage of morning commuters travelling into Marylebone in May and noticed about 40/60 reading paying Fleet Street Titles, mostly Telegraphs, Mails and Times, with half a dozen Guardians. A carriage of sixty people on the same service earlier this year had only five newspaper readers out of 65, two Mails, a Times and two Metros (a new model freesheet with which some say the streets of London are paved). Most were reading books, playing with phones or ipods and doing puzzles. The fact that more than twice as many people in the carriage found it more engaging to stare out the window than to read a Fleet Street paying title indicates the depth of the problem.

This brings me to Rupert Murdoch’s announcement that all his titles will start charging for online content by next year. I can understand why and sympathize. All hard indications are that his present business model is melting under him faster than the polar icecap. He’s already tried diversifying into the yacht hire business, so, Children, this is serious.

The rub has to be how to charge — the devil is most certainly in the detail. It is not easy to fix your roof in the hurricane season, and the music and video industries’ experience is not entirely encouraging. FT is probably the most interesting payment model in the UK, and this may be a way to go. Whether people would shell out for gossip, and if so how much is another question. Will his new subscription income match the amount he will have to spend on lawyers?

Perhaps an inexorable content evolution is happening. The hot journalistic added value is progressively not to be found in the story, which is likely to surface through hot media way before anywhere else, but rather the op-ed aspect of it.

The money shot will be in the quality of writing and comment in depth, not the scoop — the breadth and connection, not the novelty.

People will always pay for particular premium content, but not mass produced Flat Earth news. I suspect that the only UK site I would subscribe to, if I had to, is BBC news. Hang on, I do subscribe. It’s called the Licence Fee and I’m glad to pay it. After a couple of decades economising on journalists, recovering high added value will be difficult on various levels for Fleet Street.

Corporately it will need companies to back out of the cul-de-sac labelled production economies and promotions and invest heavily and counterculturally in good present and future journalists — not something they have shown any particular desire or proclivity for doing. I’m not sure any of the Fleet Street stable have the journalistic resilience to produce anything worth paying for, but I’d love to be wrong.
We’ll see.

PS Thanks to Jeff Jarvis on 24 August, for three more nails in the US Newspaper Coffin — Coupons and Circular (Valassis), Movie listings, and death notices...

h/t the Disney Dinosaur — who found out the hard way all about dwindlng resources and the need to change...