Live blogging Studio 20’s Open Studio at NYU

December 12, 2013 in Broadcasting, Business, Journalism, News, Outlining | Permalink

Below is my live blogging, in outline form, of the final presentations of work by NYU graduate journalism students in Jay Rosen’s Studio 20 class, which I’ve served for three semesters as a visiting scholar. Open Studio was the name of the event.

I wrote and posted it with Fargo.io. Blake Hunsicker, on the left, also talked up Fargo and outlining in his talk.

Mike Rothman, one of the students, asked me to live blog the event. Jay also asked me to shoot pictures there. So I got off to a bit of a slow start as those two obligations collided a bit. My notes gradually improved after the first couple of presentations, including Mike’s. Apologies for the slow start.

I finally got into a full groove during Josh Benton‘s closing talk.

It’s now 1:36 in the morning, so I’ll stop editing at this point and pick up the rest after I’ve rested.

Meanwhile, it was an absolute pleasure and privilege to participate in this class. I’ll miss everybody, but I’m also glad to know how well they did and how much better they’ll do as their journalism careers take off.

Links:

Jay’s guidance: “Your presentation needs to rock”
Patrick Hogan (@phogan)

  • Geeks and Glass
  • Alas, was busy shooting pix and doing other stuff. Will fill in later.

Mike Rothman (@TheRealRothman) with ABC News

  • Live Blogging is his topic, and what I’m doing now.

Cecelia Bittner (@MCeceliaBittner)

  • Problem: Can networks of people help in reporting a beat?
  • Partner: Fast Company
  • “A generation of women with the world and all its knowledge at their fingertips.”
  • Hashtag: #FCMobilize
  • High correlation between tweeting actively and moving conversation forward. Branch and Facebook were fails.
  • “Not worth a reporter’s time to force connections.”
  • Nice graphic of a Mobilizing Machine

Nuha Abujaber (@nuabu) and Mélodie Bouchaud (@Meloboucho)

  • Problem: Keeping ‘city life’ coverage current with the way users communicate now.
  • Using short videos and stills to augment the print magazine.
  • Like the many variations on TONY (time out new york), e.g. TONYpreview, TONYnow, OnlyTONY.
  • “Fifteen seconds is enough…”

Simran Khosla (@simkhosla)

  • Partner: Pando Daily
  • Problem: Adding data specialists to a newsroom doesn’t spread data journalism fast enough
  • Solution: data visualization-based stories “We thought visualization first…Doing the chart starts the article.” Helping the data journalist. e.g. with tutorials.

Derick Dirmaier (@derickdirmaier), Jesse Kipp (@JesseKipp), Johannes Neukamm (@JFNeukamm)

  • Problem: With “Snow Fall” the innovation came after the story was completed. Can’t we do better?
  • Partner: Creativist, digital mag Atavist
  • “Snowfalling” became a term used in newsrooms. Style followed. “The aesthetic was more important than the story telling.”
  • “Story Wars” with scroll kit, hi, sStory, Cowbird, Maptia, Creativist…
  • The solution: Profoundly Digital Reporting. PDP.
  • So they entered the Mongol Rally.
  • Captured motion, audio, video. stills, traced the route, 20k miles.
  • Design tools are storytelling tools.
  • PDP 1) Platform 2) Open Source Tools 3) Photo/Video/Audio Editing software 4) Data Visualizations
  • Preview titled Traverse.
  • 3 persepectives — Jesse’s notes, audio tracks, navigation elements
  • You get a feel for the experience of the Rally, with a map slider. TimelineJS, GeoJSON, D3 Libraries…
  • Not all stories are profoundly digital.
  • New genre of journalism: opportunity, not a threat.

Blake Hunsicker (@BlakeHunsicker, BlakeHunsicker.com)

  • Problem: Most people are coming in the middle of the movie: How do we catch them up?
  • Partner: Syria Deeply
  • Solution: a Deep Reader.
  • Went to Turkey, working on ways journalists can explain. “We don’t get much out of what the news tells us… updates but no context. Where to start?”
  • Need for onramps. Ways to become acquainted.
  • Used an outliner: “I came to this after digging Fargo.io, Dave Winer’s outliner. (Which I’m writing in now, here.)
  • Deep links, annotated comments, expanding, contracting, telescoping to whatever depth you like. You can read two minutes’ worth, or half an hour.
  • FAQ — Syria according to Syrians: “their stories, more than those told to us by pundits or politicians…”
  • Takeaways: 1) Repuurpose what works elsewhere 2) Explore how to change a deep reader as news develops 3) Work with good people

Boryana Dzhambazova (@BoryanaDz)

  • Problem: We’ve got a core group of dedicated fans: what do we do with them?
  • Partner: Narratively
  • Narratively was born as a kickstarter, has grown dramatically since. Fanatical fans, which are also a core market.
  • Introduce a paid model. Membership perks: e.g. personalized search, read later feature, notifications of upcoming themes, ability to comment, ebook collections, member-only events
  • Model: Pay what you want, as with Radiohead.
  • Many pitches come from aspiring writers. So turn a burden into an asset. Hence a fan club page where writers can pitch to other writers, with winners getting hired off submissions. Includes real-time editing.
  • Nice archive of timeless and beautiful stories.
  • Weekender: archived stories. Much higher than industry average open rates.
  • Assignment room. New approach to navigation and browsing. Go by theme, editor, writer, notes…

Danielle J. Powell (@DanielleJenene)

  • Problem: Repurposing TV documentary by putting it on line is lame: there has to be a better way.
  • Partner: Aljazeera America (@ajam)
  • Disruption in cable news. More media used online. Cord-cutting. Meanwhile TV is still the king of news.
  • Harmony where there is disruption. Add value.
  • Worked with @ajam on Faultlines, a documentary series.
  • Create harmony:
  • 1) Identify content that complements rather than mirrors
  • 2) Take other content into account, stuff that can stand alone, and add value.
  • Content that works:
  • Background — explains, like deep reader
  • Conversational — e.g. live tweets
  • Follow-up — info not seen in episode, or current after broadcast
  • Visual — infographics, instagram.
  • Key: production process that takes multiple platform into account simultaneously
  • talk digital and map out projects from the pitch
  • collect digital assets
  • Viewer+ : turn viewers into both viewers and readers, commenters, etc. Expand beyond cable, for example to where it’s not available.

Speaker: Josh Benton of Nieman Lab

  • Jay: “Josh is almost as obsessive as I am.”
  • Topic: The Year in Innovation. Twenty slides/topics
  • Mobile
  • Customizing Breaking News. Out of NBC. Can mute some topics, e.g. Miley Cyrus. All about interrupting you properly. Breaking news is not the same for every brain. The app will evolve over a year.
  • Still lots of news used on desktops and laptops. Still just for Mac and Safari. Still a way off from this being generalized.
  • You get an inbox, everybody gets an inbox. Latest: Instagram direct. Move your sexting from SnapChat to Instagram. “I cannot tell you how terrifying” this is. Too many inboxes. The more we move to closed networks, the more problematic access becomes for journalists.
  • Reporting: building beats beyond geography. Buzzfeeds fascinating. Building a beat structure from scratch. Construct reporting structures from the ground up.
  • Global cooperation. Level of what we have now was impossible in the past. You can make it work now. Example: offshoring. New thing: “collaboration fatigue” 86 journalists in 44 countries.
  • (A fire alarm went off. Ignored. Interesting: not news… not anything.)
  • Robot reporting. Algorithmic, that is. (There are no good pictures of algorithms, but are of robots.) LA Times had a story with a map up in seconds or minutes (8 in this case), thanks to an algorithm that picks up news from data sources. “Our robot friends are allies and helpers.”
  • Incentivizing truth. Rise of politifact, et. al. People are more likely to believe false negatives based on ideological bent: believing wrong info about the other side. “What if we gave small rewards” they remember X was not the case. Rewards raises likelihood of admitting they don’t know. We talk about polarization. But there is potential for seeing a thinner layer of wrongness.
  • Presentation. Snow flurries following Snow Fall, which was so big, intense and developed that everybody now has one. Or more. Remarkable that these can now be produced at a high rate. Nicely designed articles are one side effect of the flurries. Stories get more special presentation than in the past. Future will feature nicely designed articles than full-blown Snow Falls.
  • Adding structure to comments. Venn-ish diagram of overlaps in responses to the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage. Gives people a moment to pause before issuing vitriol.
  • Infinity comes to radio. NPR’s infinite player. (Not many knew about it, me included.) Creating a radio-like experience that leverages content backlog, and gives NPR a way to see what people like. Pandora-like “more like this” and “less like this.” Mention of PRX, with the Remix service and app.
  • Responsive and unloved redesigns. One code base that works for all formats. Great solution to terrible mobile websites. Led to a lack of info density on websites. So you have one giant story, with a few other items. Take a moment to consider that it is possible to think too much about mobile. 85% will still be on a tablet or desktop, not a smartphone.
  • Social. Event Parrot (@eventparrot): a Twitter experiment. Permission to be interrupted by Twitter, for news. “By the way, Mandela just died.” An interesting moment because news orgs have invested in Twitter, which is mostly non-prejudicial. But::: when you live on somebody else’s platform, you run risks.
  • The triumph of the morning email. e.g. Quartz. 2013 had the rise of the stream. Design choices toward the steam, and a counter-movement toward digest-y summary by email. Qz has story after story online, yet has a success with the daily email.
  • Everybody has a TinyLetter. A little mailing list for newsletters, in addition to other methods. Reporters now work not only for publishers, but for their own “brand.” The idea is to personalize communications with readers or audiences.
  • New York Times’ Fourth Down Robot. Real-time notification of success rates in those situations. Punt or not? Remarkable that this is a twitter account and a news service. Find how your team’s coach made a poor decision.
  • News video for social and mobile. e.g. Now This News. Mobile/Social. Looks like MTV in 1983. Seems a bit alien at first. They can create, on the spur of the moment, create a :15 video for Instagram and :06 for Vine.
  • Money. Paywalls 2.0: Build the paywall you want. NYTimes set the pace, made it okay for everybody else. We can assume that others will follow the Times’ moves in 2014. They got 750k people to pay. Nice, but slowing. And can you get revenue from those not subscribing. They plan a super-premium level, with access to Times events. Editors will come over and wash your car. Headed toward lots of pay products.
  • A local television paywall. WCPO in Cincinnati will be the first to put up a paywall. Vetting for Scripps. Hiring dozens of new journos to work there. Until now local TV has not been nearly as disrupted as other news orbs. Many potential problems. Uptake, for example.
  • The Boston Globe’s Airline pricing. Already has comfort with many Web products. After investing in responsive design, they came out with an iPhone app, that’s just $4 month. The bet is that if you pay $4 for iPhone, you won’t pay $15 at all. So it’s like airline seat pricing this way. Trying to undercut their own model.
  • Packaging. Putting content in new containers. e.g. The Guardian’s robot newspaper: the long god read. Have a small batch paper that culls successful pieces from the last week, algorithmically, and then lays it out, again algorithmically, in a form that works for readers in a coffee shop. This is the seed of an idea that will have other applications in the future.
  • Today’s paper. e.g. NYTimes’. If the President gets shot mid-day, it won’t be in here. In this sense it’s like the print paper. It’s a reaction to the constant stream of content, which is still in NYTimes.com. With this you know hundreds of thousands are reading the same thing. (Also, presumably, not personalized.)
  • Retro Report. Stories covered 20-30 years ago. e.g. Garbage Barge. 12-minute videos. Bracing reminder that coverage is often terribly mistaken. Nice to see archives put to use. The archives are there.
  • Civil Beat’s Law Clinic. An Omidyar project that covers stuff differently. What can a news org be and stand for in a different way? One answer: fighting for the readers. A legal aid center for a constituency. Civil Beat will provide help in the form of real legal assistance. Example of a forced rethinking of what a news org does. Fulfilling information needs in a different way.
  • Overall, optimistic.
  • Started Nieman Lab in ’08. Been uphill since then. Continued growth and institutionalization. Seeing that old dogs as well as new ones have new tricks.

Links for today

December 11, 2013 in Links | Permalink

No time to turn these into linky text. So I’m just giving you the links. If I have a chance later, I’ll turn them into text. Meanwhile, dig:

Photography

  • Stephen Lewis
    • http://bubkes.org/2013/12/01/sofia-rooftops-one-view-many-stories/
    • http://bubkes.org/2013/12/01/sofia-rooftops-one-view-many-stories/
    • http://bubkes.org/2013/11/22/ghost-of-commerce-past-abandoned-storefront-tahtakale-quarter-eminonu-istanbul/
    • http://bubkes.org/2013/11/18/mattresses-brooms-and-art-in-bulk-tahtakale-istanbul-commerce-direct-and-unadorned/
    • http://bubkes.org/2013/11/15/eminonu-waterfront-pickles-in-cups-grilled-mackerel-sandwiches-and-invented-traditions/
    • http://bubkes.org/2013/11/07/waterside-commerce-flower-vendor-with-coat-to-match/
  • Duncan Davidson
    • http://duncandavidson.com/
    • http://jdd.io/
  • Thomas Hawk
    • http://thomashawk.com/
    • http://thomashawk.com/2013/12/why-i-dont-support-black-day-at-flickr.html

Tech

  • http://www.sprinklr.com/resources/whitepapers/social-media-dream-team/
  • https://www.dropbox.com/s/xghrnmsq9jq8h8s/Best%20Practices%20for%20Enterprise%20Social%20Media%20Management%20by%20the%20Social%20Media%20Dream%20Team.pdf
  • http://pribook.me/blog/
  • http://pribook.me/
  • http://opensource.com/business/13/12/fintp-to-open-source
  • https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Who-Runs-the-Internet-graphic.png
  • http://www.businessinsider.com/new-google-takeout-feature-2013-12#ixzz2muYKmynO

Surveillance vs. Privacy

  • http://www.privacybydesign.ca/content/uploads/2013/12/pbd-big_privacy.pdf
  • http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vrm/2013/12/06/get-ready-for-big-privacy/
  • http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/state-surveillance-data-tom-stoppard
  • http://security-architect.blogspot.com/2013/12/big-data-needs-big-privacy.html
  • http://maplight.org/content/73373
  • http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6308
  • http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_culture.lawrence_lessig/doc.html#17

Journalism + Freedom

  • http://studio20nyu.tumblr.com/post/66911766672/open-studio-night-dec-12-6-to-8-pm-at-nyu-would-you
  • http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/09/us-russia-media-idUSBRE9B80I120131209
  • http://maisonbisson.com/oss4lib/why-freedom-matters/

Politics

  • http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/california-assembly-gop-astroturfs
  • http://deanbaker.net/books/the-conservative-nanny-state.htm
  • http://money.cnn.com/2013/12/10/technology/bitcoin-jpmorgan/
  • http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11012

Society

  • http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-capitalism-marx-two-americas-wire

Science

  • http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/no-light-show-expected-from-comet-ison/2013/12/05/8853fa90-5c7f-11e3-be07-006c776266ed_story.html

Grace Apgar, 1912-2013

December 7, 2013 in Art, Family, Past, Personal | 2 comments

Aunt Grace — my father’s younger sister — died yesterday at her home in Maine. She was 101 years old, and in good health until just a couple days ago. Last month, in fact, she flew to San Diego to visit one of her granddaughters.

Grace often said she wanted to live to 108, like her mom, Ethel F. (née Englert) Searls. We should all be so lucky as either one.

Talk about a good life.

Grace was a lifelong artist, best known for her ceramic Toby Mugs, which she made in the basement studio of the Apgar family home alongside Big Brook in Marlboro, New Jersey. She and Uncle Archie moved there around the turn of the ’50s, with their three kids, George, Ron and Sue. The house was first built as a mill in the early 1700s and had been through many incarnations afterwards. Archie continued to work on improving it through the rest of his life. Same went for the land, which the family also farmed for many years.

When Grace finally “retired” a few years ago, after the age of 90, she didn’t go south like so many seniors. Instead she moved to Edgecomb, Maine. There she continued to maintain a vigorous and independent life.

To help remember her, I’ve put together a couple photo sets on Flickr: one of shots throughout her life, and one of her 100th birthday party last year. The former are mostly from her own photo collection, which I’ve been scanning and posting over the last several years. Some are of Grace, some are of her relatives and friends, and some are mine that she’s commented on, as “gsapgar.” She was the last person whose approval I still craved.

I’ll miss her smarts, her humor, her hospitality, her generosity, and her loving presence in the world. She was as fine a Mom, aunt, grandma, great-grandma and friend as anybody could wish for.

We’ll all miss her.

Rushing around

December 5, 2013 in Broadcasting, Business, News, radio | Permalink

RadioINK reports that Rush Limbaugh is switching stations in three markets:

Clear Channel Los Angeles says Rush will be moving from KFI to KTLK-AM in January. KTLK-AM will become The Patriot AM 1150, home of Los Angeles conservative talk radio, featuring Rush, Hannity, Glenn Beck and others. A similar move is being made in San Francisco where Rush will be moving from KKSF-AM to KNEW-AM. And as expected on Rush will move from WABC to WOR. The Clear Channel strategy is to move Rush off an established station, in the case of L.A. and San Francisco, to anchor a new station and help build that station up. Clear Channel recently purchased WOR-AM in New York and he’s being moved off WABC, a Cumulus station.

In all those cases the move is to a station with less coverage. Technicalities:

I’m also wondering how much the temporary move of Rush in Boston from WRKO/680 to WXKS/1200 helped “build up” the latter.  These days WXKS is running Bloomberg business news, which fills a niche but isn’t a big ratings winner.

The larger picture here, and the reason I bring this story up, is that the real stations aren’t the stations at all, but the shows and the talent. Rush’s listeners care about Rush, not where they find him. As this fact becomes more obvious over time, look for the Clear Channels of the world to become routers of talent and programming through any available medium (especially the Net, which is where everything is already moving), rather than a collection of radio stations.

And let’s face it: Rush isn’t on any one station. He’s on SCAN. Keep hitting that button and you won’t miss him.

Not missing is the future of radio. And, maybe, of all media.

 

Can we at least try not to kill 440,000 patients per year?

December 4, 2013 in Business, Harvard, Health, history, Life, Personal, problems | 11 comments

Obamacare matters. But the debate about it also misdirects attention away from massive collateral damage to patients. How massive? Dig To Make Hospitals Less Deadly, a Dose of Data, by Tina Rosenberg in The New York Times. She writes,

Until very recently, health care experts believed that preventable hospital error caused some 98,000 deaths a year in the United States — a figure based on 1984 data. But a new report from the Journal of Patient Safety using updated data holds such error responsible for many more deaths — probably around some 440,000 per year. That’s one-sixth of all deaths nationally, making preventable hospital error the third leading cause of death in the United States. And 10 to 20 times that many people suffer nonlethal but serious harm as a result of hospital mistakes.

The bold-facing is mine. In 2003, one of those statistics was my mother. I too came close in 2008, though the mistake in that case wasn’t a hospital’s, but rather a consequence of incompatibility between different silo’d systems for viewing MRIs, and an ill-informed rush into a diagnostic procedure that proved unnecessary and caused pancreatitis (which happens in 5% of those performed — I happened to be that one in twenty). That event, my doctors told me, increased my long-term risk of pancreatic cancer.

Risk is the game we’re playing here: the weighing of costs and benefits, based on available information. Thus health care is primarily the risk-weighing business we call insurance. For generations, the primary customers of health care — the ones who pay for the services — have been insurance companies. Their business is selling bets on outcomes to us, to our employers, or both. They play that game, to a large extent, by knowing more than we do. Asymmetrical knowledge R them.

Now think about the data involved. Insurance companies live in a world of data. That world is getting bigger and bigger. And yet, McKinsey tells us, it’s not big enough. In The big-data revolution in US health care: Accelerating value and innovation (subtitle: Big data could transform the health-care sector, but the industry must undergo fundamental changes before stakeholders can capture its full value), McKinsey writes,

Fiscal concerns, perhaps more than any other factor, are driving the demand for big-data applications. After more than 20 years of steady increases, health-care expenses now represent 17.6 percent of GDP—nearly $600 billion more than the expected benchmark for a nation of the United States’s size and wealth.1 To discourage overutilization, many payors have shifted from fee-for-service compensation, which rewards physicians for treatment volume, to risk-sharing arrangements that prioritize outcomes. Under the new schemes, when treatments deliver the desired results, provider compensation may be less than before. Payors are also entering similar agreements with pharmaceutical companies and basing reimbursement on a drug’s ability to improve patient health. In this new environment, health-care stakeholders have greater incentives to compile and exchange information.

While health-care costs may be paramount in big data’s rise, clinical trends also play a role. Physicians have traditionally used their judgment when making treatment decisions, but in the last few years there has been a move toward evidence-based medicine, which involves systematically reviewing clinical data and making treatment decisions based on the best available information. Aggregating individual data sets into big-data algorithms often provides the most robust evidence, since nuances in subpopulations (such as the presence of patients with gluten allergies) may be so rare that they are not readily apparent in small samples.

Although the health-care industry has lagged behind sectors like retail and banking in the use of big data—partly because of concerns about patient confidentiality—it could soon catch up. First movers in the data sphere are already achieving positive results, which is prompting other stakeholders to take action, lest they be left behind. These developments are encouraging, but they also raise an important question: is the health-care industry prepared to capture big data’s full potential, or are there roadblocks that will hamper its use

The word “patient” appears nowhere in that long passage. The word “stakeholder” appears twice, plus eight more times in the whole piece. Still, McKinsey brooks some respect for the patient, though more as a metric zone than as a holder of a stake in outcomes:

Health-care stakeholders are well versed in capturing value and have developed many levers to assist with this goal. But traditional tools do not always take complete advantage of the insights that big data can provide. Unit-price discounts, for instance, are based primarily on contracting and negotiating leverage. And like most other well-established health-care value levers, they focus solely on reducing costs rather than improving patient outcomes. Although these tools will continue to play an important role, stakeholders will only benefit from big data if they take a more holistic, patient-centered approach to value, one that focuses equally on health-care spending and treatment outcomes.

McKinsey’s customers are not you and me. They are business executives, many of which work in health care. As players in their game, we have zero influence. As voters in the democracy game, however, we have a bit more. That’s one reason we elected Barack Obama.

So, viewed from the level at which it plays out, the debate over health care, at least in the U.S., is between those who believe in addressing problems with business (especially the big kind) and those who believe in addressing problems with policy (especially the big kind, such as Obamacare).

Big business has been winning, mostly. This is why Obamacare turned out to be a set of policy tweaks on a business that was already highly regulated, mostly by captive lawmakers and regulators.

Meanwhile we have this irony to contemplate: while dying of bad data at a rate rivaling war and plague, our physical bodies are being doubled into digital ones. It is now possible to know one’s entire genome, including clear markers of risks such as cancer and dementia. That’s in addition to being able to know one’s quantified self (QS), plus one’s health care history.

Yet all of that data is scattered and silo’d. This is why it is hard to integrate all our available QS data, and nearly impossible to integrate all our health care history. After I left the Harvard University Health Services (HUHS) system in 2010, my doctor at the time (Richard Donohue, MD, whom I recommend highly) obtained and handed over to me the entirety of my records from HUHS. It’s not data, however. It’s a pile of paper, as thick as the Manhattan phone book. Its utility to other doctors verges on nil. Such is the nature of the bizarre information asymmetry (and burial) in the current system.

On top of that, our health care system incentivizes us to conceal our history, especially if any of that history puts us in a higher risk category, sure to pay more in health insurance premiums.

But what happens when we solve these problems, and our digital selves become fully knowable — by both our selves and our health care providers? What happens to the risk calculation business we have today, which rationalizes more than 400,000 snuffed souls per annum as collateral damage? Do we go to single-payer then, for the simple reason that the best risk calculations are based on the nation’s entire population?

I don’t know.

I do know the current system doesn’t want to go there, on either the business or the policy side. But it will. Inevitably.

At the end of whatever day this is, our physical selves will know our data selves better than any system built to hoard and manage our personal data for their interests more than for ours. When that happens the current system will break, and another one will take its place.

How many more of us will die needlessly in the meantime? And does knowing (or guessing at) that number make any difference? It hasn’t so far.

But that shouldn’t stop us. Hats off to leadership in the direction of actually solving these problems, starting with Adrian Gropper, ePatient Dave, Patient Privacy Rights, Brian Behlendorf, Esther Dyson, John Wilbanks, Tom Munnecke and countless other good people and organizations who have been pushing this rock up a hill for a long time, and aren’t about to stop. (Send me more names or add them in the comments below.)

Daily Diggings

December 3, 2013 in Links | Permalink

Broadcasting

Infrastructure

Journalism

Tech

Science

Uh oh

How to rescue radio

November 30, 2013 in Broadcasting, Business, infrastructure, problems, radio, VRM | 19 comments

towerRadio used to be wireless audio on a broadcast band. That’s still the short version of every dictionary definition.

But now radio is streamed audio. That was already the case when webcasting* showed up in the ’90s, and even more so with the rise of Last.fm, SiriusXM, Pandora, rdio, Spotify and every other audio service delivered over the Net.

And now Apple delivers a crowning blow, with this:

This isn’t just the height of presumption on Apple’s part. It’s a body-snatch on all of radio, as well as a straight-up knock-off of Pandora.

But it’s actually worse for radio than it looks here.

What used to be called Radio (iTunes’ collection of webcasting radio stations), which had already been pushed down one directory level to “Music,” is now available only under a new button called “Internet.” (See the screenshot above.) Worse, it won’t appear unless you open preferences in iTunes and check a box to turn it on.

So Apple clearly hates radio as we’ve always known it, and could hardly be more passive-aggressive about subordinating it to their own closed, exclusive, silo’d and proprietary service. (Here’s some bonus evidence.)

So where does this leave plain old over-the-air radio — you know, the kind that fades away when you drive out of town?

Simply put, in a new context. That context is the Net. That’s the new broadcast band. Here on the Net (where you are now), audio servers are the new transmitters and mobile devices are the new portable radios.

So, some advice.

For stations, networks and chains:

  1. Normalize to the Net. That doesn’t mean just “digital first.” It means recognizing that the Internet is your coverage area, and the new native land for all forms of radio, including Satellite. This is the lecture that @JeffJarvis has given for years, correctly, to his friend @HowardStern and to @SiriusXM, where Howard (also correctly) anchors the whole link-up.
  2. Recognize that the Net does not belong to the cable and phone companies but to nobody, which is why it covers the world. Think of it as a world of ends (where every audio source and every listener is a separate end), and NEA — nobody owns it, everybody can use it, and anybody can improve it. Including you.
  3. Choose a streaming URL (or a set of URLs) for your station(s) that will be as permanent as your over-the-air dial positions. Make sure you’re streaming in .mp3 or some other standard codec that all mobile apps can receive. (Right now the burden of finding a streaming URL in the first place is a pain in the ass.)
  4. Transmit over the air in HD. Yes, HD has problems, and the adoption rate is still low. But it’s an all-digital bridge between net-casting and over-the-air.
  5. Continue to use RDS (RDBS in the U.S.) with your analog signals. That way it will display your identity and content on radios equipped to do so, most of which, so far, are in cars.
  6. Support every possible app that moves toward re-creating the old dial-based radio experience. The closest I’ve seen so far is the BBC’s iPlayer app, which isn’t available in the U.S.
  7. Have truly unique programming. If you’re running what dozens or hundreds of other stations are running, you’re just a relay.
  8. Look toward making more money from subscriptions and voluntary donations than from advertising. More about that below.
  9. Think in terms of relationships, and not just listeners. This is essential because listeners have communication power now too. Don’t waste it by looking at them only as populations. This isn’t easy, because the grooves of one-way-one-to-many non-relating are nearly a century deep. But those who relate best will win biggest.
  10. Make podcasting a normal and easy part of your mix of offerings. More listeners will listen, more of the time (which they will make for themselves.) And, if you can’t easily podcast because you’re doing music, see the last section below.

For app developers:

  1. Keep up the pioneering work done by Tune In, Wunderradio, PRX’s Public Radio Player, Stitcher and the rest. But note this…
  2.  No app yet (to my knowledge, at least) re-creates the simple experience we got from knobs, dials and uncomplicated read-outs on good old-fashioned radios. In effect we’re still stuck where mp3 players were before the iPad came along with its scroll wheel. Only now the shitty experience is on our mobile devices, including our Apple i-things.
  3. Ease the experience of listening, and recording (like with DAR.fm), across everything possible. I know this isn’t easy, because chains like Clear Channel (with its iHeartRadio) and the BBC like to limit listening within their app to their own stations. But this isn’t what most listeners want.
  4. Work toward a single easy non-proprietary way to support subscription services (such as SiriusXM) and volunteer-pay services, (such as public radio stations in the U.S). Everybody with that model will make more money, much more easily, if the process isn’t different for every station, every network, every service.
  5. Symbolize relationships (especially paid ones) with UI elements that are easy to read and universally used and accepted. I recommend the r-button, which the VRM development community came up with, and which is there for the taking. The ⊂ represents the person’s side of the relationship, while the ⊃ is the ‘caster’s. If you’re interested, talk to me about it.
  6. Think relationships, not just listeners.

For equipment makers:

  1. Quit making shitty radios. The receiving circuitry and antennas for most home and portable radios have been awful for awhile now, and I don’t expect them to get better. But I think there is room for some companies still making radios to put out a few actually good ones. And include HD. (The best makers of portable radios, C.Crane and Sangean, don’t do HD — yet. And Sony, which used to make the best portables, hasn’t cared about radio in decades.)
  2. Ibiquity (developer and licensor of HD Radio technology): change your game. Adoption by equipment makers is clearly too slow and too hard. Hell, you’ve been around since 2001, and now you’re bragging on just the first car to feature it. This search on Amazon for “HD Radio” should bring up lots of results, rather than a few hens’ teeth. And do whatever it takes for the champions of good reception — C.Crane and Sangean — to jump on board.)
  3. Make radios that hunt easily from over the air analog to HD Radio to streams on the Net. That’s key to The Transition.

For everybody:

  1. Lobby to overhaul the complex and market-hostile royalty system for webcasting, and its inequities with over-the-air broadcasting. Replace it with something sane and respectful of the all-digital world to which we are moving.
  2. In respect to the link above, note this language: Sections 112 and 114 require that rates for the statutory licenses for webcasting and for ephemeral recordings must be the rates that most clearly represent the rates that would have been negotiated in the marketplace between a willing buyer and a willing seller. That boldfaced language is a relic of the DMCA, which was passed in ’98 — just three years after the dawn of the graphical browser, before anybody could imagine that the Net could support willing buyers and sellers of streamed music. The effect of this has been to marginalize or kill music podcasting, to name just one victim. Nobody wants the rights-holders to get screwed, but everybody should recognize by now that its the music itself, and the relationships between artists, distributors (including radio service operators) and listeners that are getting screwed by the current system. We can do better. Hell, it’s almost 2014. Let’s get this done.

* “Webcasting” should have been called “netcasting” in the first place. As Wikipedia says at the moment (at that last link), “Essentially, webcasting is ‘broadcasting’ over the Internet.” The difference is important because the Web is something that runs on the Net, rather than a synonym for the Net.

Weekend Reading

November 30, 2013 in Links | Permalink

In order of closing tabs:

Linkings

November 25, 2013 in Links | 4 comments

Science, Tech & Politics

Surveillance vs. Privacy

Markets +/vs. Marketing

Infrastructure

Aviation

Business

Revisiting the last great comet

November 25, 2013 in Events, Fun, Future, history, News, Photography, Science | 1 comment

With Comet Ison on the horizon (but out of sight until it finishes looping around the Sun), I thought it might be fun to re-run what I wrote here in 1997 (in my blog-before-there-were-blogs), about the last great comet to grace Earth’s skies. — Doc

 

Ordinary Miracles:
Start Your Day With Comet Hale-Bopp

Hale-Bopp

Graphic by Dr. Dale Ireland, whose excellent comet page is here.

By Doc Searls
March 6, 1997

It’s 5:15AM as I write this. A few minutes ago, after the kid woke us for his breakfast, I walked to the kitchen to fetch a glass of water. When I arrived at the sink, I looked up and saw the most amazing thing: Hale-Bopp, the comet, brighter than any star, hanging from the Northeast sky over San Francisco Bay.

I’ve seen five comets in my life. None have been more spectacular than this one is, right now. It’s astonishing. Trust me: this one is a Star of Bethlehem-grade mother of a comet.

Considering the comet’s quality, publicity has been kind of weak. Which makes sense, since I have noticed an inverse relationship between comet quality and notoriety.

KahoutekThe most promoted comet in recent history was Kahoutek, in 1971. Kahoutek was supposed to be the biggest comet since Halley last appeared in 1910. But after all the hype, Kahoutek was nearly invisible. I can’t even say I saw it. At least I can say Ilooked and that maybe I saw something. (But hey, I lived in Jersey at the time. Whaddaya ‘spect?)

Comet WEstIn fact, Kahoutek was such a big no-show that when Comet West appeared in 1975, it received almost no publicity at all. But it was a wonderful comet. First it appeared as a morning star with a bright little tail about one moon long, above the Eastern horizon. Then, after it whipped around the Sun and flew back out toward its own tail, the comet spread into a wide V that graced the evening sky like God’s own logo. At the time I lived in a rural enclave outside Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and every night for several weeks a few of us would wander out and marvel at the show.

HalleyThe next comet was Halley, in 1986. Astronomers had rightly mixed feelings about Halley. On the one hand, they knew this would be one of Halley’s least visible visits. On the other hand, they knew it would raise interest in astronomy. Well, Halley was nearly as big a bust as Kahoutek. At best the “Great Comet” was a tiny smudge in the sky. Can you see it in this picture? Right. My friend Jerry Solfvin and I had about the same luck when we joined a 3AM traffic jam of about 10,000 people who went to the far side of Mt. Diablo to look at this. By the way, this picture is from the Hyuktuke Gallery at the NEFAS (Northeast Florida Astronomical Society) site.

Comet Hyuktake showed up about a year ago, and enough time had passed since the Halley disappointment to allow the new comet a fair measure of publicity. And Hyuktake was a beauty. When it skirted the North Star, the comet’s tail stretched across a sixth of the sky. The best image I’ve found is this cool 3-D number by Dave Crum. Click on it to visit a larger version at the NEFAS site.

And now we have Hale-Bopp. Although Hale-Bopp won’t come nearly as close to Earth as Hyuktake did, it’s putting on a bigger show, mostly because it’s a bigger comet. A lot bigger. This thing is more than 200 times larger than Halley: about 40km across. You can actually see some shape to it, even with the naked eye. To spot it, look to the Northeast in the early morning, when it’s still dark. You’ll see it below and to the left of Cygnus (the Northern Cross), pointing straignt down toward the horizon. It’ll be brighter than any other star in the sky, and with a tail that stretches across the Milky Way. On the 6th you’ll also see the last sliver of moon down to the East, and on succeeding days the moon will move out of the way long enough for a great view.

Finally, let’s not forget the kid, who was born between Hyuktake and Hale-Bopp. In this context the miracle of his arrival (to parents our age) seems almost ordinary.

Anyway, it might be fun to find the publicity coefficient of modern comets that at least get a little press. If the relationship is inverse, as I suspect, consider this modest page a bit of publicity prosthesis.

And don’t miss it. This may be the last comet you ever see.

Bonus links from the present:

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