Media:but not as it was

Recently I have been commenting on changes underway in the media, especially with regard to the disruptive impact of the Internet upon traditional print media.

Posts such as ‘Dead Tree business models and Time, Newsweek decline -The Economist rises being the two most recent.

Now the issue seems to have erupted in NZ, especially in the NZ Blogosphere with the announcement by Barry Colman, publisher of National Business Review, that he intends placing 20% of NBR website content behind a pay barrier. For this he intends to charge a massive NZ$298 per annum.

Lance Wiggs has written an excellent analysis the whole is well worth reading, but in Colman’s announcement – rant as some have called it – Colman wrote the following

And to add to the madness it has been the aggregators that have profited the most from the supply of that free news copy.

Wiggs responded:-

This is an indication that the NBR leaders don’t really understand the current news internet business model. The aggregators, such as google news, are driving traffic to the NBR site, and without them the NBR would be even worse of than it is. By locking them out of the subscription area NBR will dramatically reduce their ability to make their compelling, orginal and timely content available to the world. The writers behind the wall will lose relevance, and the newspaper itself will diminish.

Colman is thus falling into the trap that others elsewhere have done.

In this regard I suspect the good people at NBR may not have read the excellent essay on the future of media by New York University digital media scholar Clay Shirky, entitled Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. They should read as well a piece by Steven Johnson, a speech he gave, Old Growth Media and the Future of News.  These two pieces foresee a radical, indeed brutal shake up of the media landscape.

Andrew Keen writing in the UK Independent commented:-

Their media may have been different, but their shocking messages were the same: newspapers are history, the two visionaries agreed. The traditional business is no longer viable, Shirky and Johnson both announced; newspapers are being replaced by futuristic digital news networks that will barely resemble their archaic print ancestors.

It seems to me that NBR and others have yet to recognize this.

Now as to what takes the place of traditional media I do not know, nor I suspect does anyone else.

To a considerable extent I think that to date many in the  media in Australasia see the web as an adjunct and an alternative, rather than as the dynamic change mechanism that it is in reality. Indeed, some media really do not seem to ‘get’ the internet at all.

We live as the Chinese curse would have it ‘In interesting times’. Certainly as Bob Dylan wrote ‘the times they are a-changing’. This change will have major cultural impact as well as impact on the mechanism of information delivery.

As Andrew Keen additionally commented:-

As Shirky wrote, “this what real revolutions are like.” They are invariably bloody and chaotic events in which “the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.” Non American journalists, publishers and editors should take note; like the unsentimental Clay Shirky and Steven Johnson, they must dare to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable.

Are our media owners doing this or are they merely reacting. Is their attitude similar to the peculiar comments expressed by Richard Posner recently over the need to restrict or stop hyperlinking.

Some NZ Blogosphere reaction to Colman’s comments can be found at Cactus Kate, Whaleoil, Kiwiblog, Anti-Dismal and Julie Starr amongst others, as well as Lance Wigg’s piece referenced above.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. We are in a time of change and one where the full disruptive effect of technological change has yet to impact and the extent of the changes is as yet not visible in all respects.

An arrogant profession humbled?

A leading article in this week’s Economist magazine is on what went wrong with economics:-

OF ALL the economic bubbles that have been pricked, few have burst more spectacularly than the reputation of economics itself. A few years ago, the dismal science was being acclaimed as a way of explaining ever more forms of human behaviour, from drug-dealing to sumo-wrestling. Wall Street ransacked the best universities for game theorists and options modellers. And on the public stage, economists were seen as far more trustworthy than politicians. John McCain joked that Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, was so indispensable that if he died, the president should “prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him.”

In the wake of the biggest economic calamity in 80 years that reputation has taken a beating. In the public mind an arrogant profession has been humbled.

Worth a read in my view.

The article concludes:-

Economists need to reach out from their specialised silos: macroeconomists must understand finance, and finance professors need to think harder about the context within which markets work. And everybody needs to work harder on understanding asset bubbles and what happens when they burst. For in the end economists are social scientists, trying to understand the real world. And the financial crisis has changed that world.

All too true and we need people who can help us understand what is happening and the impact.