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What the ad biz needs is to exorcize direct marketing

October 6, 2013 in Journalism, problems | 21 comments

In What the ad biz needs is writers, Michael Wolff bemoans the absence of good writers in advertising:

…even creatives want to avoid writing — because they can’t…

While technological disruption is most often blamed for the existential predicament of the media business, the more precise problem is that advertising doesn’t work as well as it used to work. This presents a crisis not only for newspapers, magazines and television — but also, according to the stock market, for Facebook. We just don’t look at advertising, respond to it, or believe it, as much as we once did, wherever it appears.

Maybe this is the reason: There are no writers in advertising anymore. Johnny who can’t write has gone into advertising.

In fact, “copywriter” is a job that now hardly exists. The historical partnership between graphic designer and copywriter has, more and more, become a partnership between project manager and programmer, or videographer and editor, or media buyer and researcher.

If you are the person who actually has to write an ad — rather than conceptualize, or produce, or program, or pitch, or research — your career in advertising is not going very well.

He is right. That he’s one of the best writers in journalism adds weight to his judgement. So does this, which closes his piece:

My suggestion to USA TODAY editors was to let the opportunity of the page encourage an agency and client to brilliantly use it. A contest — always beloved in the ad business — was suddenly born.

USA TODAY is offering a million dollars in free advertising pages if you can fill them smartly — with cleverness, wit, style, economy of words. Again, free. Now, that will make your client happy.

Just spell out your big idea and tell your arresting story.

It may be that all we have to do to reinvent traditional media, save Facebook, even make digital media a decent business, as well as move more merchandise, is bring back the copywriter.

I’m for that — and I’m eager to see how the ad business responds to the contest.

But I also think the problem is bigger than writing itself, or technological disruption.

The problem is that direct marketing has body-snatched advertising.

In the old days direct marketing was distinct from adverting. In even older days, direct marketing was called direct mail. Or, in the vernacular of its recipients, junk mail. Some key differences, from back in the pre-snatched era of advertising’s history:

  • While advertising was impersonal, direct marketing was personal. It called you by name. Or wanted to.
  • While advertising was about raising general awareness of a company, product or service, direct marketing was about selling you stuff. Hence the term direct response, which is what most of direct marketing on the Net is looking for today.
  • While advertising was creative-driven, direct marketing was data-driven.
  • While advertising favored qualitative results, direct marketing favored quantitative results.
  • While advertising respected personal privacy by default (it didn’t get personal), direct marketing never cared much about it — despite assurances to the contrary.

In the old analog world, advertising and direct marketing remained blessedly separate. No first-rank copywriter, art director or creative director wanted to tar his or her hands (or resumé) with direct marketing work. In fact, most of that work didn’t happen on Madison Avenue at all, but in specialty shops somewhere out in Florida or Indiana.

But once the analog and the digital world merged, direct marketing’s obsession with data gathering and analysis had nearly infinite room to grow. Like cancer, or worse.

It seemed innocent enough when it was just text ads off to the side of Google search results, or on the margins of blogs and other Web pubs. That stuff was called advertising because, well, it was. And that’s when the body-snatch began. Because that stuff was called advertising, so was everything that followed when direct marketing imperatives and methods moved to the fore.

In the online world, advertising messages are not much about increasing brand awareness, or other old-fashioned advertising purposes. (Though today’s ad folk love to throw the word “brand” around.) Instead the main purpose is getting direct responses: clicks and sales, aimed by personal data, gathered and analyzed every possible way. The idea is to  make the advertising as personal as possible, as far as possible, regardless of how creepy it gets. It’s all fully rationalized. (Hey, you can opt out if you don’t like it.)

In the analog world of old-fashioned Madison Avenue advertising, there were physical limits to saturation. Not so online. Today advertising comprises 99.x% of all email traffic. (Most of it is spam, but it’s hard to tell the difference.) It has also turned ad-supported Web pages into syringes for injecting countless unseen files into users’ browsers. Those files then follow users everywhere to collect data for the new ad industry’s analytic mills, so the body-snatched business can then deliver “a better advertising experience,” as if anybody actually wants it.

And now the snatched ad business want to dominate our mobile lives as well. For a taste of how this looks on the ad-mill side, check out MediaPost‘s MobileMarketing Daily. Lots of rah-rah for what most phone users can only dread. Examples:

They do, however, report on some push-back:

Yet there is one thing both traditional advertising folk and direct marketers have in common, and that’s blinders toward reality.  Terry Heaton puts it well:

Operating within the soul of every marketer is the ridiculous assumption that people want or need to be bombarded by advertising, and that any invasion of their time or experience to “pass along” an attempt to influence is justified. If this were true, there would be no looming fight over DVRs, which allow viewers to skip ads. You have no inherent right to my eyeballs, and it is precisely this axiom that makes today’s instruments and gadgets so powerfully disruptive to the culture.

How so? We’re weary of running a relentless gauntlet of jumping, screaming, frantic warnings, hands grabbing, voices shouting, noise-making, disjointed movements, and the almost demonic reaching for our wallets coming from advertising. This is Madison Avenue’s idea of perfection, and the only way you can get there is to completely ignore the effect of advertising on the very people you’re trying to influence. The Web is, at core, a pull mechanism, not one that pushes. It’s why all those big projections of advertising “potential” have turned into a commodified “pennies for dollars” reality.

In reality, advertising has become ineffective because it is no longer advertising, at least in the digital world. It is direct marketing, calling itself advertising.

To live again as a stand-alone discipline, advertising needs to exorcize the devil that direct marketing has made of advertising online. Simple as that.

For more on how real advertising actually works better than the direct marketing kind, read Don Marti‘s Targeted Marketing Considered Harmful. Then move on to the rest of Don’s growing medicine cabinet of direct marketing disinfectant for adverting.

Bonus link.

 

 

Pirate radio lives, big time, in New York

September 13, 2013 in Broadcasting, Geography, infrastructure, Journalism, music, Places, Politics, problems, radio, Research | 2 comments

Last Saturday evening I was walking up Wadsworth Avenue in Manhattan, a few blocks north of 181st Street, when I passed a group of people sitting sitting on the steps of an apartment building. They were talking, drinking, eating snacks and listening to a boom box set to 94.9FM. A disc jockey chattered in Spanish, followed by music. I noticed the frequency because I’m a lifelong radio guy, and I know there isn’t a licensed station on that channel in New York. The closest is WNSH, called “Nash,” a country-music station in Newark, on 94.7. Given the disc jockey and what little I heard of the sound of 94.9, I was sure the station was a pirate and not just somebody with one of those short-range transmitters you can jack into a phone or a pad.

Before I started hanging at this end of Manhattan I thought the pirate radio game was up. After all, that was the clear message behind these stories:

But where I mostly hang is a Manhattan apartment that is highly shadowed from FM signals coming from the Empire State Building and 4 Times Square downtown. (That’s where all New York’s main licensed stations radiate from.) Between those transmitters and our low-floor apartment are about a hundred blocks of apartment buildings. Meanwhile, our angle to the North and East (toward The Bronx both ways) is a bit less obstructed. From here I get pirate signals on all these channels:

  • 88.1
  • 88.7
  • 89.3
  • 89.7
  • 91.3
  • 94.5
  • 94.9
  • 959
  • 98.1
  • 98.9
  • 99.7
  • 102.3
  • 103.3
  • 104.7 (Same as the busted one? Sounds like it.)
  • 105.5

I can tell most are pirates because they tend to disappear in the morning. Nearly all are in Spanish and most play varieties of Caribbean music. (Which I wish I could understand what the disc jockeys say, but I don’t.)

As for 94.9, here’s how it looks on the display of the Teac 100 HD radio in our kitchen:

Estacion Rika

RDBS is the standard used for displaying information about a station.  The longer scroll across the bottom says “OTRA ESTACION RIKA.” Looking around a bit on the Web for that, I found this page, which says (among much else) “La administración de Rika 94.5 FM  Rikafm.com)…” So I went to RikaFM.com, where a graphic at the top of the page says “‘FCC Part 15 Radio Station’.” Part 15 is what those tiny transmitters for your mobile device have to obey. It’s an FCC rule on interference that limits the range of unlicensed transmissions to a few feet, not a few miles. So clearly this is a claim, not a fact. I’ve listened in the car as well, and the signal is pretty strong. Other links at RikaFM go to its Facebook and Twitter pages. The latter says “3ra Radio en la cuidad de New York Rika fm una estacion con talentos joven cubriendo toda la ciudad de NY musica variada 24hrs.,” which Google Chrome translates to “The 3rd Radio in the city of New York RikaFM a station with young talents covering all the varied music NYC 24hrs.”

To me this phenomenon is radio at its best. I hope somebody fluent in Spanish and hip to Caribbean music and culture will come up here and study the phenomenon a bit more closely. Because the mainstream media (thus far — consider this a shout-out, @VivianYee 🙂 ) is just coving a few minutes of the authorities’ losing game of whack-a-mole.

The postal model of privacy

September 7, 2013 in Business, Harvard, history, infrastructure, Internet, Journalism, Law | 10 comments

On February 25, 2008, the FCC held a hearing on network management practices in the Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School, hosted by the Berkman Center. In that hearing David P. Reed, one of the Internet’s founding scientists, used a plain envelope to explain how the Internet worked, and why it is wrong for anybody other than intended recipients to look inside the contents of the virtual envelopes in which communications are sent over the Internet. It was a pivotal moment in the debate, because the metaphor illustrated clearly how the Internet was designed to respect privacy.

Respect, that is. Not protect.

In the early days of postal communications, the flaps of envelopes were sealed with blobs of wax, usually imprinted by the sender with a symbol. These expressed the intent of the sender — that the contents of the letter were for the eyes of the recipient only. Yes, a letter could be opened without breaking the seal, but not without violating the wishes of the sender.

The other day I wrote, “clothing, for example, is a privacy technology. So are walls, doors, windows and shades.” In the physical world we respect the intentions behind those technologies as well, even though it might be easy to pull open the shirts of strangers, or to open closed doors without knocking on them.

The virtual world is far less civilized. Proof of that is in the pudding of privacy rights violations by agencies of the U.S. government, which is clearly acting at variance with the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which says,

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

I see three ways to approach these violations.

One is to rely on geeks and whistleblowers to pull the pants down on violators. In Welcome to the end of secrecy,  says the very openness that invites privacy violations is our best protection against the secrecy concealing those violations.

Another is through the exercise of law. In The Only Way to Restore Trust in the NSA, security guru Bruce Schneier writes, “The public has no faith left in the intelligence community or what the president says about it. A strong, independent special prosecutor needs to clean up the mess.” And that’s on top of moves already being made by legislators, for example in South Africa. Given the scale of the offenses now coming to light, we’ll see a lot more of that, even if no special prosecutors get appointed. The law of the jungle will give way to a jungle of new laws. Count on it.

The third is through business — specifically, business modeled on postal services. For many generations, postal services have respected the closed envelope as a matter of course. Yes, we knew there were times and places when mail could be inspected for legitimate reasons. And there were also many things it was not legal to do, or to send, through postal systems. But, on the whole, we could trust them to keep our private communications private. And we paid for the service.

The Googles of the world — companies making their money on advertising — aren’t likely to take the lead here, because they have too much invested in surveillance (of the legal sort) already. But others will step forward. The market for privacy is clear and obvious, and will only become more so as the revelations of abuse continue to pour out.

Perhaps the businesses best positioned to offer secure communications are the postal services themselves. They’ve already been disrupted plenty. Maybe now is the time for them to do some positive disruption themselves.

 

 

News: Watching Cable Die

August 26, 2013 in Broadcasting, Business, infrastructure, Internet, Journalism, News, North Carolina, problems | 24 comments

Now that Al Jazeera English‘s stream has been killed in the U.S., the only two streaming global news organizations available on computers and mobile devices are France24 and RT. They look like this:

In other words, like TV. Talking heads and reports from the field.

Also like PR.

I certainly get that from RT, the initials of Russia Today. Sez Wikipedia,

RT, previously known as Russia Today, is an international multilingual Russian-based television network. It is registered as an autonomous non-profit organization[2][3] funded by the federal budget of Russia through the Federal Agency on Press and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation.[4][5]

France24, sez Wikipedia,

… is an international newsand current affairs television channel based in Paris. Its stated mission is to “cover international current events from a French perspective and to convey French values throughout the world.”[1] It started broadcasting on 6 December 2006 under the presidency of Jacques Chirac and prime ministerial term of Dominique de Villepin.

Neither are as interesting to watch as Al Jazeera English was when we could still see it here in the U.S. Nor are they as large and substantive as Al Jazeera.

Yet @AlJazeera‘s apparent disinterest in talking about anything that might not promote its new Al Jazeera America (@AJAM) cable channel suggests the same kind of PR-based DNA. Far as I know (and feel free to correct me), @AlJazeera remains unwilling to talk out loud about why it chose to kill its live @AJEnglish stream in the U.S. — or to cover that move as the real news it was, and still is.

Whatever else it may be (and it’s a lot), Al Jazeera is also vanity project by the monarchy of Qatar. Ideally that would make it an example of what James Fallows calls a way for “this Gilded Age’s major beneficiaries (to) re-invest in the infrastructure of our public intelligence.”

Jim is talking there about Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post. In that same piece, he says, “Foreign reportage, serious investigative or government-accountability coverage — functions like these have always been, in economic terms, parasites that need to ride along on some profitable host body.” In the U.S. the profitable host body in cable news has been its presentation as entertainment, political axe-grinding, or both. One would hope Al Jazeera America takes the high road here, but the fact remains that going cable-only was a low-road move. Especially since the Al Jazeera abandoned the high road it was on — live presentation on computers and mobile devices — along with the infrastructure of public intelligence the company was helping to build there.

On Saturday’s Gillmor Gang, Robert Scoble said he thought Al Jazeera was playing a “long ball” game here. They certainly have the money. But they’re starting way behind. First, they fired — and pissed off — the loyal audience of early adopters they had on the Net. Second, they made the mistake of giving the Al Jazeera name to a wholly new operation in the U.S., where (sad to say) “Al (anything-Arabic)” is certain to be associated by many cable viewers with Al Qaeda, the only outright enemy of the U.S. with a name everybody knows. If they had called it “AJ” (in the manner of Russia Today’s RT) it might have had a better chance. Third, they either got dropped or not picked up by the largest cable companies, while those that do carry it (e.g. DirectTV and Dish Network) have exiled it to more expensive tiers than those CNN and Fox News enjoy. Those operators also run Al Jazeera America’s video in low-def SD instead of hi-def HD. So the new network could hardly be starting farther behind, or in a business with less chance of long-term success.

On that last topic, I have to wonder what the calculus of the “deal” to kill the live AJE stream was. That was not only an awful lot to pay for very little in return; but it isn’t even clear who it was paid to. Time Warner? AT&T? Neither carries @AJAM at all. And the others hardly seem to give a damn about the channel anyway. [Later: see my comment here.] I can imagine this dialog between Al Jazeera and the U.S. cable companies:

AJ: We killed our firstborn so it would not offend you. Will you carry our channel now?

SOME CABLE COMPANIES: No.

OTHER CABLE COMPANIES: Um, okay, maybe on one of our high-priced tiers, in lo-def.

AJ: Okay.

On top of all that, @AJAM and @AJEnglish are apparently different services, serving different audiences: cable viewers and computer/mobile device viewers. I suppose @AlJazeera thought its streaming audience would jump at the opportunity to go retro and watch something else from the company on cable. @AlJazeera might be right about that, but that looks to me like something between wishful thinking and outright delusion.

The cable industry’s disdain for Al Jazeera is one more example of why cable is a dead medium walking. As a big coercive silo that many viewers barely tolerate or actively hate — and stick with only because the shows they want to see are trapped inside the thing — its worst enemy is itself. Consistent with that, cable features some of the world’s worst exemplars of bad customer service.

Meanwhile other traditional sources of high-quality TV news have so adapted to life inside cable’s silo that their live streams are almost impossible to get. Dig this, for example:

What you see there is the futility of trying to watch ABC’s live stream online. Talk about a f’d “experience.” Either the app says it can’t determine one’s location (my experience in New York, the Bay Area and Southern California — wish I got a screen shot), or that it’s only available in those areas and three others where the viewer happens not to be. Then, for  those who want the Compleat Futility Experience, there’s that third page there, a non-responsive Web page squeezed to un-readability on a mobile screen.

Here’s the thing: TV hates the Net. Simple as that. It has hated the Net for as long as it’s known that the Net was a threat to its coercive system. That’s why the MSOs (a trade term for cable+satelite) call video distribution on the Net “over the top” or OTT. And also why it’s no surprise to find only one cable program source (Viacom) among Comscore’s top ten online video companies. The rest are Net-native, starting with Google. (See Tristan Louis‘ Is Google Killing Cable? for more on where this goes.)

Most of what people watch on the Net isn’t news. Or, if it is news, it doesn’t look like what we see in those top images above. Nor should it — any more than cars in 1900 should have looked like railroad coaches.

Video on the Net is wild, crazy and exploding out of anybody’s control, including Google’s. Mostly it is coming from everybody. Not just from the usual suspects.

And it isn’t TV.

Let’s face it: TV is channels. (Never mind that what are now called “channels” and “networks” are neither, in the original senses of those words.) In the U.S. those channels are nothing more than a collection of branded program sources delivered by some of the least caring companies on Earth to an audience forced to watch through crappy gear with a horrible user interface. In the growing ocean of video from everywhere on the Net, TV has the buoyancy of a bowling ball.

It’s just a matter of time before it sinks.

It’s also a matter of cost. Cable is expensive, and not getting cheaper.

The biggest thing keeping it afloat is live sports. In the U.S., that’s ESPN. They’re the life jacket on cable’s bowling ball.

At some point ESPN goes direct OTT and the rest of TV will either die along with cable or moult out of cable’s dead husk. If Al Jazeera America is one of the casualties, we’ll be prepared, because we’re already getting practice at living without it. And it won’t be news at all.

[Later (29 August)…]

In response to a corrective comment by Fritz Mills below I’ve done a bit of research to see how cable and satellite companies are carrying Al Jazeera America. Finding out isn’t too easy, because most of these companies (at least on the cable side) only tell you what’s available at a given address. So I just checked with as many companies as I had the patience and time to visit, and got this:

  • AT&T U-Verse: Dropped, and sued by Al Jazeera for breach of contract
  • Cablevision: Dropped when Al Jazeera bought Current TV
  • Charter: Not there
  • Comcast: 254, in the top tier “Digital Preferred 160+” package, in low-def, and moved there (thanks, Dennis McDonald for that link) from the basic tier that @AJEnglish had been on
  • DirectTV: 215, in low-def, as part of  a higher tier
  • Dish Network: 358, in low-def, as part of the “America’s Top 200” tier
  • Cox: Not there
  • RCN: 326. on its “signature” (second highest) tier, in low-def
  • Time Warner Cable: Dropped back in January, when Al Jazeera bought Current TV
  • Verizon FiOS: On PrimeHD, Extreme HD and Ultmiate HD — a total of six different channels, two apiece on each tier (one SD, one HD)

Meaning you can get it in HD on basic cable only on Verizon FiOS.

There are two fiber-based companies on the list: RCN and Verizon. Fiber is interesting because there is virtually unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is more scarce with cable and satellite, which is one reason they carry some channels only in higher tiers (to reduce demand) and in low-def SD instead of HD. They also compress the HD far more than fiber carriers need to, which is why HD channels on fiber tend to look better (provided they aren’t too compressed back upstream).

That’s why Verizon FiOS wins on that list above. RCN could also make AJAM HD, because they have the bandwidth. But instead they make it SD, and put a green $ in lieu of a √ in the checkbox, to make clear that it’s “available at a premium“. Which means it might as well not be there.

On the matter of Al Jazeera coming clean about the deal to kill the @AJEnglish stream in order to be carried by MSOs in the U.S., the closest thing I’ve found to an inside detail is an Email from Marwan Bishara to AJ executives, dated 10 July 2015, posted by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, and featured in his 14 July story, Inside look at the internal strife over Al Jazeera America, subtitled “As the new US network is finally set to launch, serious concerns arise about its brand and intent: especially from within the organization.” One excerpt from the email:

Have we signed a deal where AJAM program/content must be substantially different from AJE? Really!!!! What does substantially mean? Who have we made the agreement with and why? I asked several executives and not a single person can give me a categorical answer about the issue, which by itself is mind-boggling!!! (I have issues with AJE’s formats, and at times perspectives, but we have so much to hold onto).

Does the fear of contractual obligations with carriers etc. mean it’s necessary for some to do whatever they want with Aljazeera, including banning AJE altogether from America and web livestream, just when they themselves try to make the case for a 21st century type television news!!!! . . . .

We still don’t know exactly what the deal was, even the effects are obvious.

I still haven’t seen @AJAM. And, like so many other dismissed viewers in the U.S., I miss @AJEnglish. So, a suggestion to @AlJazeera: make one or both available on a subscription basis. A lot of us might pay for that. Per-stream subscriptions where TV is going anyway, once cable falls apart. Get ahead of that curve.

Breaking news: Al Jazeera kills its live stream

August 20, 2013 in Broadcasting, Business, infrastructure, Internet, Journalism, News | 31 comments

If you have an Al Jazeera app on your U.S. mobile device you can no longer watch or listen to live streams. Click on the yellow LIVE button and then on “PLAY” next to “Watch Live” or “Listen Live” and here is what happens:

Go to the Al Jazeera website, click on “watch now” and you get to a page that says this:

The Al Jazeera English live stream is no longer available in the U.S.

Starting tomorrow, August 20th, you’ll be able to watch more of the in-depth reporting and great content you love on the new Al Jazeera America television channel.

Click here to see if your local television provider will be carrying Al Jazeera America. If not, let your voice be heard and please request it today.

Here’s how you can keep in touch with us and get all the latest updates about Al Jazeera America’s launch:

  • Visit the website
  • Subscribe to our email list
  • Follow @AJAM on Twitter
  • “Like” our page on Facebook

For the latest news and in-depth coverage from Al Jazeera English:

  • Read our live blogs
  • Download our mobile apps
  • Follow @AJELive on Twitter
  • Follow @AJEnglish on Twitter

Nice choices, but no substitute for live streams.

And no explanation of why. I assume it’s “due to copyright and distribution restrictions,” which are mentioned here. But a value-subtract of this magnitude deserves a full explanation. As a news organization Al Jazeera should report on exactly why it killed its streams.

Personally, I assume that the big cable companies insist that the streams be killed as a precondition for carrying the new Al Jazeera America cable channel. But, as I said back on 9 August, I don’t know.

Want to see a good model of a news organization covering news about itself? Look at what NPR is doing with news that its CEO is leaving. They (notably @davidfolkenflik) expose the whole thing, cover it as a news event, and open it up for discussion in comments.

Credit where due: Al Jazeera America’s Facebook page has comments and replies. People like me (a veteran watcher of Al Jazeera English on mobile devices who rarely watches cable) are not happy. Examples:

Ruth Arhelger No, I won’t be watching any AJ programs anymore no matter how much I wish I could because I have no way to access it. I refuse to pay more for television than I do for electricity and killing live stream is the worst idea anyone at your network has ever had. I hope at some point in the future you decide not to alienate people who can’t afford cable tv.

John Waddington where is the live stream ? what idiot turned off the live stream ?

Adey Imru Makonnen Shame that AJ English will disappear – goodbye objectivity

Jimbaux’s Journal No, because I don’t have cable and am unwilling to pay for it, partly because I just don’t like spending much time in front of the television, but I have your live feed that you posted in another comment bookmarked and will see posts that you make here on this page. Thanks for giving us options.

Al Jazeera America Jimbaux’s Journal – We encourage you to continue following us and stay tuned for updates:http://america.aljazeera.com/

Thomas Chupein No, I won’t and I am really sad. I don’t have a TV and I refuse to waste money on cable when there is almost nothing that I would watch. It was so hard to lose all the live streaming these past two days – I don’t blame AJAM but I am really sad – I can’t stomach even five minutes of U.S. news programs, and I was really looking forward to this.<

Al Jazeera America Thomas Chupein– We understand your concerns but we encourage you to join us online for Al Jazeera America news coverage to access articles and video content:www.aljazeera.com/america. Also, please continue to follow us for updates!

There are also lots of positive replies from people who like their cable news on TV and won’t miss the AJE live feed on computing devices. Those are the people Al Jazeera is after, obviously. Not cord-cutters like me and a few million others.

But it’s a retro move. And, I suspect, a costly one.

[Later…] Riyaad Minty ‏@Riy tweets,

and to those, our most loyal #AlJazeera viewers in the US, who have lost the live streams. We hear you. We’re working on it.

Thanks, Riyaad. Please make the new streams live and not just a collection of clips and pre-recorded programs. The latter is what the competition does, and you should do better than that.

Here’s more from Janko Roettgers on Gigaom.

Daily Outline

August 13, 2013 in Journalism, Links | 1 comment

Media

Surveillance

  • The low road to a stack of needles. By Dan Blum. His bottom lines: “But if more and more users go underground, the trend will feed on itself as the market for successor services to Lavabit and Silent Circle grows and their functionality improves. Law enforcement will no longer be able to find the needles in the haystack because more of the haystack will be a stack of needles. And then we’ll see the old debates of PGP, encryption escrow and the Clipper chip reprised – this time with a much more powerful national security establishment at the helm and significantly more real threats on the horizon. It could end up being the law of the jungle on the Internet…”
  • That cookie-killing student? An ad agency just hired her. By Kate Kaye in AdAge.

News isn’t about cable. Or newspapers. It’s about us.

August 12, 2013 in Blogging, Broadcasting, Future, Internet, Journalism, News, problems, radio | 3 comments

Read Dave’s Cable News is Ripe for Disruption. Then Jay Rosen’s Edward Snowden, Meet Jeff Bezos. Then everything Jeff Jarvis has been writing about lately.

Then listen to the August 9 edition of On The Media. Pay special attention to the history of New York’s newspapers, and the strike of 1962-3. Note how vitally important papers back then were to the culture back then, how the strike (by a union tragically committed to preserving a dying technology that employed >100k people) killed off three of the seven papers while wounding the rest, and how that event gave birth to TV news and launched many young journalists (Nora Ephron, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, et. al.). Listen to other interviews in the show about the history of media, from telegraph to telephony to radio and beyond.  Note also how structural separation assures that the past will have minimal drag on the future, and how laws (e.g. antitrust) learn from bad experiences in the marketplace and society. There’s a lot of other meat to chew on there.

Then, if you’re up for it again (I’ve improved it a bit), read what I wrote here about Al Jazeera giving up on the Net while it goes after CNN, et. al. on cable.

I have only one complete, though provisional, thought about all of it:  TV news is ripe for complete replacement and not just disruption. What will replace it is up to us. (Note: radio is different. I’ll explain why in a later post. On the road right now, so no time.)

Bonus link.

Al Jazeera isn’t covering some big news about itself

August 9, 2013 in Broadcasting, Future, infrastructure, Internet, Journalism, Live Web, problems | 11 comments

Right now if you want live streaming of TV news, 24/7, on the Net, here in the U.S., from a major global news organization, you have just two choices: Al Jazeera and France24.

Soon you’ll have just one, because Al Jazeera’s stream is going away. That’s because the company will turn its stream off when it fires up its new cable channel, Al Jazeera America, on August 20.

Which means this will go away from the Al Jazeera website…

… along with this option when you open up your mobile app:

… and you’ll get no more live video like this:

Or so I gather.

Everything I just wrote is a provisional understanding: the best I can do so far. Some or all of it might be wrong.

Here’s what I do know for sure.

First, Al Jazeera bought Current TV from Al Gore and is re-branding it Al Jazeera America. In Al Jazeera America: A Unicorn Is Born, Joe Pompeo of New York Magazine calls this move “arguably the biggest American TV-news launch since Fox News and MSNBC more than a decade ago.”

Second, if you go to http://america.aljazeera.com/get-aljazeera-america, you’ll see this:

In case you can’t make out the small print, it says “When Al Jazeera America launches on August 20th, Al Jazeera English will no longer be available on TV or as an online stream in the U.S.” That means gone completely, right?

Maybe not. Al Jazeera English isn’t all of Al Jazeera. If you click on the “Watch Live” button here…

… you’ll get a page with the URL http://www.aljazeera.com/watch_now/, where there is this set of choices:

Click on “Al Jazeera Mobile Services” and it lists apps for a variety of mobile devices. All talk up “free access to the live stream” (or equivalent copy) as a main feature. Are they just late to removing or qualifying that copy? Or will the live stream be gone only from the website?

Click on “How to watch Al Jazeera English online” and you get this copy:

How to watch Al Jazeera English online

View our network through the internet via websites, online TV providers and mobile apps.

Last Modified: 12 Jul 2013 14:50
Watching Al Jazeera English via the internet is now easier than ever. The network is broadcast around the world to over 220 million households, but don’t worry if you can’t find us on your television.A range of websites, online TV providers, and mobile apps now offer a live stream of our channel. Browse the list below to discover the best way for you to watch and click the links on the left for specifics.

Websites
Al Jazeera English Watch the broadcast on our website.
Livestation Our UK-based partner streams AJE live.
YouTube See our live stream, programmes and news clips.
Facebook On the social networking site, stay tuned with AJE.
Dailymotion Watch programmes and news clips on AJE’s channel.
Connected TV 
Samsung Smart TV Watch the live stream and video-on-demand from the app.
LG Smart TV Watch the live stream and video-on-demand from the app.
Roku In the channel store, access the Newscaster.
Google TV See the AJE feed through the Google play app.
Boxee Watch AJE on your box through the Livestation app.
PlayStation 3 Open up the Livestation AJE feed through your console’s browser.
Mobile
iPhone/iPad/iPod View live news from AJE on Apple devices through the iTunes app.
Blackberry Open your internet browswer and watch Al Jazeera live.
Android Use our new app to watch AJE on your smart phone.
Symbian/Windows Live stream Al Jazeera English on your mobile through Mobiclip.

Due to copyright and distribution restrictions, not all viewers will be able to access all of our streaming video services.

Are they killing off all of that stuff in the U.S. or just some of it? What exactly are those copyright and distribution restrictions, and how are they involved in this new move? They surely aren’t killing off the live Net streams for no reason, so obviously they were forced to make trade-offs. What were they?

Hey, they’re a news organization. What they’re doing by going all-cable with no-Net, is sacrificing the future for the past, seems to me. At the very least they should be transparent about what they’re doing and why .

I’ve been trying to get answers out of @ajam (Al Jazeera America), @aljazeera (Al Jazeera PR), @ajenglish and facebook.com/aljazeera. Here’s one Twitter conversation that began with an @ajam tweet:

  1. Attention Al Jazeera fans in the US: Al Jazeera America launches on August 20. Find out how to get it here: http://aljazeera.com/getajam 

@ajam It says “Al Jazeera English will no longer be available on TV or as an online stream in the U.S.” That mean no phone or tablet too?

  1. @dsearls @ajam imho, AJAM will lose credibility if AJE no longer available in US after AJAM launch.

  2. @dsearls @ajam The streets will run with the blood of the infidel.

  3. Credibility a must for terrorists. RT@mwiik: imho, AJAM will lose credibility if AJE no longer available in US after AJAM launch.

  4. @dsearls @ajam have you received an answer yet? I don’t see a reply and I’m wondering same thing

  5. @ajam Let me put the Q another way: does AJAM’s debut on cable turn off all AJ streams in the U.S? Or just some? Please be clear.

  6. @dsearls Al Jazeera English online videos will not be available in the U.S. You will still be able to read articles on their site.

  7. @dsearls Al Jazeera America follows in the same tradition of hard-hitting unbiased journalism so be sure to check us out when we launch.

  8. @ajam Please don’t succumb to corporate/gov pressure and fade into MSM inanity. We need a real adversarial truth2power option. @dsearls

  9. @ajam Does this mean no Al Jazeera streams of any kind in the U.S. except via cable or satellite?

  10. @ajam @dsearls Does this similarly apply to their YouTube channel? iOS apps?

  11. @ajam Am looking forward to the AJAM launch, but was hoping to still have access to both services.

  12. @ceebeth @ajam Asked the same question at http://facebook.com/aljazeera  and it got erased. Guess AJ killing live streams isn’t news. #journalism

  13. @ajam Will Al Jazeera apps for US users on iOS and Android still have the “LIVE” button after 20 August? #VRM

  14. @dsearls One might get the idea @ajam‘s lack of transparency on this first blow on its credibility, even before it launches.

(I have no idea why WordPress puts a strike through the @ sign. I just copied the list out of Twitter and pasted it into the composing window here.)

I also went to Al Jazeera’s Facebook page and politely asked what was going on. I’d quote what I wrote, but it’s gone. I don’t know why. Maybe they erased it somehow. Or maybe, not being as adept at Facebook as I should be, I just can’t find it.

Whatever the story, Al Jazeera isn’t covering it — and, I am guessing, they don’t want it covered.

But it is a story. The world’s most ambitious news organization is making a big move on the U.S. news marketplace by subtracting value from what it’s already doing — and none of its competition are doing.

There is no bathwater in the live news streams Al Jazeera is tossing on the 20th. It’s all babies. Here are four of them:

  1. Leading edge early adopters. Cord-cutters. That’s the audience Al Jazeera already has online.
  2. Advocates. Friends. I was one. See here.
  3. Companions. Meaning everything else on the Net that isn’t on cable, such as YouTube.
  4. A platform for networked journalism. Cable ain’t it. The Internet is.

Cable is still big, but it’s the past. The Net is the future. Hey, just ask James Dolan, the CEO of Cablevision. In The Future of TV Might Not Include TV, the Wall Street Journal begins,

Predicting that transmission of TV will move to the Internet eventually,Cablevision Systems Corp. Chief Executive James Dolan says “there could come a day” when his company stops offering television service, making broadband its primary offering.

But I guess Al Jazeera is a cable channel at heart. And less of a news organization than it aspires to be — or they’d come a lot cleaner about what they’re doing here. And why they’re stiffing their entire online audience in the U.S.

Well, at least we still have France24.

[Later…] According to Janko Roettgers in Gigaom, Al Jazeera is not only getting ready to block its English streams in the U.S., but is killing off access to news clips on YouTube as well.

[19 Aug, 11:23pm Pacific time…] The deed is done:

 

 

Daily Outline

August 6, 2013 in Broadcasting, Business, infrastructure, Internet, Journalism, Links, Photography, Places, problems, Quote, Technology | Permalink

Cool

Personal data and independence

  • The Independent Purchase Decision Support Test, by Adrian Gropper, M.D. Pull quote: ” What I need is an Agent that’s independent of my ‘provider’ institution EHR and communicates with that EHR using the Stage 2 guidelines without any interference from the EHR vendor or the ‘provider’. It’s my choice who gets the Direct messages, it’s my choice if I want to ask my doctor about the alternatives and it’s my doctor’s choice to open up or ignore the Direct messages I send.” (EHR is Electronic Health Record.)
  • Your data is your interface. By Jarno Mikael Koponen in Pando Daily. Pull quote: “Before solving the ‘Big Data’ we should figure out the ‘small’ personal part. Algorithms alone can’t make me whole. Different services need my continuous contribution to understand who I really am and what I want. And I believe that apps and services that openly share their data to provide me a better user experience are not far off.”
  • Jarno is also the father of Futureful (@futureful) which Zak Stone of Co.Exist (in Fast Company) in says “hopes to bring serendipitous browsing back to the web experience by providing a design-heavy platform for content discovery.” Just downloaded it.

Media

  • The rebirth of OMNI — and its vibe. Subhead: Glenn Fleishman on the imminent reboot of the legendary science and science fiction magazine. In BoingBoing. Two bonus links on the OMNI topic:
  • Jeff Bezos buys the Washington Post. This is either wonderful for journalism or horrifying. By Sarah Lacy in Pando Daily. Pull quote: “John Doerr…described an entrepreneur with uncommon focus and discipline around what the customer wants. I guess the future of the Post will ride on who Bezos sees as ‘the customer’ and what’s in his best interest.”
  • Donald Graham’s Choice, by David Remmick in The New Yorker.
  • Here’s Why I Think Jeff Bezos Bought The Washington Post. By Henry Blodget in Business Insider. Pull-quote:
    • First, I’d guess that Jeff Bezos thinks that owning the Washington Post will be fun, interesting, and cool. And my guess is that, if that is all it ever turns out to be, Jeff Bezos will be fine with that. This is a man who invests in rockets and atomic clocks, after all. He doesn’t necessarily make these investments for the money. Or bragging rights. Or strategic synergies.
    • Second, I’d guess that Jeff Bezos thinks that there are some similarities between the digital news business and his business (ecommerce) that no one in the news business has really capitalized on yet.
  • The Natives Are Feckless: Part One Of Three. By Bob Garfield in MediaPost. Pull-quotage:
    • Well done, media institutions. You have whored yourselves to a hustler. Your good name, such that it remains, is diminished accordingly, along with your trustworthiness, integrity and any serious claim to be serving the public. Indeed, by bending over for commercially motivated third parties who masquerade as bona fide editorial contributors, you evince almost as little respect for the public as you do for yourself.
    • There’s your native advertising for you. There’s the revenue savior being embraced by Forbes, the Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Business Insider and each week more and more of the publishing world.
    • According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, sponsored content of various kinds was a $1.56 billion category in 2012 and growing fast.
  • Future of TV might not include TV. By Shalini Ramachandran and Martin Peers in The Wall Street Journal. It begins, “Predicting that transmission of TV will move to the Internet eventually, Cablevision Systems Corp Chief Executive James Dolan says ‘there could come a day’ when his company stops offering television service, making broadband its primary offering.” And wow:
    • In a 90-minute interview on Friday, the usually media-shy 58-year-old executive also talked about his marriage, his relationship with his father Chuck and his after-hours role as a singer and songwriter. He said his rock band, JD & the Straight Shot, toured with the Eagles last month.
    • Mr. Dolan said that on the rare occasions he watches TV, it is often with his young children, who prefer to watch online video service Netflix, using Cablevision broadband.
    • He added that the cable-TV industry is in a ‘bubble’ with its emphasis on packages of channels that people are required to pay for, predicting it will mature ‘badly’ as young people opt to watch online video rather than pay for traditional TV services.
  • Making TVs smart: why Google and Netflix want to reinvent the remote control. By Janko Roettgers in Gigaom.
  • Hulu, HBO, Pandora coming to Chromecast. By Steve Smith in MediaPost. Pull-quote: “A battle over content clearly is brewing between Google and Apple. Apple TV has recently expanded its offerings of content providers to include HBO Go, Sky TV, ESPN and others. The two companies are pursuing different delivery models as they try to edge their way onto the TV. Apple TV is a set-top box with apps, while Chromecast relies on apps that are present on mobile devices to which the dongle connects.”
  • Setting TV Free. By yours truly in Linux Journal.

Tech

Retail

Legal

Handbaskets to hell

A good word for a good cause

July 20, 2013 in Awesome, history, Ideas, Journalism, Photography, Politics, Research, Travel | Permalink

@BlakeHunskicer has a kickstarter project, Fleeing the War at Home: An interactive documentary introducing the crisis in Syria through the personal histories and dreams of Syrian refugees, with a few days and a few thousand dollars left to go.

Blake is one of the graduate students I got to know this last year as a visiting scholar in @JayRosen_NYU‘s Studio20 (@Studio20NYU) class at NYU. He’s a terrific journalist and photographer already, and will put both skills to good use for a good cause. Join me in helping him make it happen.

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