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The Meaningless Scramble for “Scoops” and “Exclusives”

05 Saturday Dec 2015

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This concept was dead before I was born
(image courtesy of Technapex)

Recently, a news crew from MSNBC bribed their way into an active crime scene and exposed information that could damage the investigation.  And why?  To get a “scoop”!  Because getting a scoop, or landing an “exclusive interview!” is important, right?

Oh bushwah.

It was disgusting.  It was journalistic malpractice.  And it was completely and utterly useless.  It gained the public no additional understanding of what had happened, it didn’t help the police, and it brought nothing but opprobrium down on the network that put out the footage.  Good work, there, MSNBC!

Look: I was watching a video on YouTube, and the (typically baritone and serious-sounding) news anchor informed us proudly that this was a story that “you’ll only see . . . on NewsChannel 3.”

 

Of course, I was watching it on YouTube.  Not only did I not know where “NewsChannel 3” was, hell, I didn’t even know what time zone they might be in.  Or when the clip was posted.  Or by who.  Nor did I care a whit.

And that’s a problem that I see with Big Media:  they’re wedded to “the scoop” or the “big get” “exclusive” interview.  And aside from a very few people that I like to see doing interviews—Jon Stewart (when he’s on his game), Rachel Maddow—I simply don’t care who has the “get,” or “the scoop,” or “broke the story.”  I don’t think anyone does, honestly.

It’s time that news organizations realized that, in an era with news aggregators, YouTube, RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, Instant Messaging, and other news-gathering tools and methods, the old rules of “scooping” simply don’t apply (if indeed they ever did outside the minds of reporters).

I don’t care who has a particular story “first,” by days, hours, or minutes.  I care about the information, and I care about whether the story is accurate, but as to whether the story came from Salon of the New York Times or “NewsChannel 3”?  Nope, don’t care in the least.  But it sure seems like the Times, the Post, the networks, Fox, and places like “NewsChannel 3” do care.

And that’s the thing; if those outlets are spending their effort going for the wrong goal–the “scoop”–then they’re not providing the public with what it wants.  And they’re not going to get an audience that is after facts that are accurate.

And as for the “exclusive” interview, these days its basically a meaningless term.  If you’re talking to Donald Trump, it’s not an “exclusive” even if The Donald wasn’t willing to talk to you last week.   That guy can’t stop talking; no interview with him can possibly be an “exclusive”.  Which goes for pretty much any other public figure, and doubly-so for politicians.  Yes, I’m interested in an interview with Elizabeth Warren, or Wendy Davis, or anyone else on my “I wonder what they’re thinking” list.  But whether it’s “exclusive” to Fox or NBC or whoever plays absolutely no part in my decision-making process.

And further, by next month or next week (or hell, sometimes even the next day), the same person will give out another interview (often also touted as “an exclusive!”) to another outlet.  With even highly-public folks posting selfies, having their own Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, or whatever accounts, the “exclusive” is a dead concept.  Sorry, mainstream media, but it is.  Get over it.

In this turbo-charged, highly-connected, text messaging and web-based culture, do we want stuff fast?  Sure we do.  But does anyone really care where the facts come from, and who gets them “first”, and whether it’s “exclusive” (whatever the heck that means any more)?  No one that I know.

Get the facts right, MSM—because if you get it wrong, it won’t matter if you’ve got an “exclusive!” or a “scoop!”; people will stop listening to you, reading you, or paying attention to you.  And they definitely won’t shell out any money for you.

So can we declare the “scoop” and the “exclusive” dead now and move on?  Please?  Because I don’t know about you, but I simply don’t care.

Election “Year” “Reporting”

21 Saturday Mar 2015

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“The boys on the bus”, image courtesy of NPR

Yes, I put both “Year” and “Reporting” in scare quotes.  Know why?  Because something that starts two years (at least) before election day is not a “year”, and because the “reporting” the reporters do from the campaign trail doesn’t qualify as true reporting, in my opinion.  Maybe “election season gossip” would be closer to the mark. 

Which is the main fact behind my whole point.

There are a couple of really irritating aspects to election reporting that I think about often, especially during election season (and especially during Presidential election season).  The first irritating thing, the reasons behind which are easy to understand, is that the vast majority of election reporting are “reports” on “the horse race”, i.e. who is up, who is down, who is moving up, etc. in the polls.  Nothing about people’s positions, who might actually make a better office-holder, what a given candidate might do in a particular situation or facing a certain vote based on their past behavior (or past votes), or hell even what their past behavior has been.  No, it’s all breathless discussions of “the polling”.  (And equally breathless discussion about how shallow modern political discourse has become in that we only discuss “the horse race”.  Which is kinda absurd, since my memory goes back to the Nixon years, and I don’t remember a whole lot of reporting on the issues back then, either.)

The reason for this is simple:  That kind of writing is easy.  I can sit here, right now, make up some poll numbers and write a story about it.  Seriously.  It’s absurdly simple, the only research it requires is looking up poll numbers, and it can easily fulfill your word quota (or minute quota) of the day.  And everything is reported in this box. It’s not “How would Candidate Jones’ statement on Israel effect his future Israel policies”; no, it’s “How does Candidate Jones’ gaffe about Israel effect his polling?”  Writing all your stories according to a pre-existing narrative is way easier than coming up with something original.  It’s like writing a new fantasy story based in Middle Earth or Westeros instead of coming up with your own fantasy world.  It’s lame, reductionist, a cop-out of your responsibilities, but it’s easy and understandable.

What I don’t understand is:  Why is there a pool of reporters traveling with each candidate at all?

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed in the last, oh, say 20 years of Presidential elections, it’s that reporters and commentators are constantly talking about how useless and news-less campaign events and speeches are, how little access they have to candidates, what a pointless exercise campaign reporting seems to be.  Expect these stories to start flooding in soon; New York Magazine got off an early salvo–the proximate cause for this blog post–just last week (20 months before election day!).  And as I read all the whining in this post, and anticipated all the whining to come in the next 20 months, I kept thinking, as John Oliver would say, “Why is this still a thing?”

One would think that reason enough to do something about campaign reporting.  But we have been hearing about–and observing–for nearly two decades now the vast shrinkage in “traditional media”.  Newspapers folding or being “consolidated”, network TV ratings dropping like rocks (along with their budgets), magazines going out of business or migrating to the Web, etc.  Money is tight in media.  They’re closing overseas bureaus all the time.  And so I get back to my John Oliver question:

Why is campaign pool reporting still a thing?

Cover campaigns, absolutely.  And I can understand why the Washington Post, New York Times, and a few other papers and TV organizations with national reach cover them.  But do CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, ABC, Bloomberg, and God alone only knows how many other networks really all need individual reporters on the ground for every candidate for every event?  Do we need reporters from the Des Moines paper going to New Hampshire in December of 2015?  You get the picture.

What I don’t understand is, with every network and paper crying pauper, why are they still doing this?  Why don’t they designate one or two people to follow these people around–particularly the right-wing nitwits who have absolutely no chance of winning–and leave it at that?  They can share their “news” with the other outlets, and write their feather-weight “news” pieces from that.  Or they can just stay home, look at the poll numbers, and write the exact same stories.  But either way, sending dozens of reporters howling after this election season’s Herman Caine is absolutely idiotic.

That’s what I think, anyway.  How about you?

The Anti-Anti-Cosby Ass-Clown Backlash

24 Monday Nov 2014

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Image courtesy of Det Snakker Viom

In case you haven’t been paying much attention to the news–I sure haven’t, honestly; it depresses me–recently Bill Cosby was accused of sexual assault/rape.  He denied it (as one might expect), and a few of his friends defended him and made the (reasonable) point about due process, assumption of innocence, and that he’s a good guy they can’t imagine would have done anything like that.  And I have to admit that it depresses me a lot; my sense of humor is apparently an amalgam of multiple sexual abusers like Woody Allen and Bill Cosby.  Lucky me.  (George Carlin is in there too.  And Bob & Ray and others.)  I don’t want him to be guilty any more than his friends.

But then multiple other women came forward with their own stories, in a manner that makes it hard to believe that Cosby is totally innocent.  And thus the debate was engaged, and the mainstream media went absolutely nuts, as it is wont to do.  Reminded me of the OJ highway chase, honestly.  Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, unemployment, the recent election results, the latest committee report that there is no there there regard Benghazi–all this might as well not exist.  It’s all Cosby, all the time.

A web zine called The Wrap (that I have never heard of) weighed in on the topic several times, and then yesterday published a post by a writer named Richard Stellar (ditto) that was titled, incredibly, “The Rape of Bill Cosby”.  As if this weren’t obnoxious enough, the lead sentence continued in this vein.  “Bill Cosby raped me.  Now that I have your attention . . .”  And it went on like that.  Disguised as an accusation of the media feeding frenzy, Stellar went on to insult victims of rape everywhere (“There is no legitimacy to justice if there is no real evidence, and evidence has a way of vanishing as memories dim with the marching of time”) along with accusing the women who have come forward of trying to “cash in” on the story.

So okay, this was horrific.  It was victim blaming in almost it’s most classic form.  But then, in a response to a Twitter-storm of protest, Sharon Waxman, CEO and lead editor for The Wrap, defended the post and Stellar, insisting it was a 1st Amendment issue and that the outrage was designed to squash alternative views.

What hogwash.

It’s spectacularly clear that Ms. Waxman simply doesn’t get it.  In her “apology” (which I put in quotes because it’s only one level removed from the classic non-apology apology of the form “I’m sorry if anyone’s feelings were hurt” that politicians use all the time), she writes, “Our Hollyblogs are written by independent bloggers and represent their own views.” Ms Waxman, I’m sorry, this is your Webzine; take responsibility for what it prints. Don’t try to fob off responsibility because it’s an “independent blogger”. Besides, as you yourself said, “Richard Stellar has been blogging for TheWrap almost since the site has existed”. Given that, it’s even more critical that you take responsibility; while Stellar may be “independent” in some absolute sense of the word, his long association with your publication renders claims of total independence dubious at best.

She also writes, “What would be the point of only publishing points of view with which we agree?”  This is a classic straw-man argument, one that she has gone to again and again on Twitter.  No one is arguing that.  Indeed, if you had posted–or Stellar had written–a post in defense of Cosby that didn’t denigrate his accusers in the title, not to mention attributing to them motives of which he can have zero knowledge and engaging in an epic spasm of victim blaming, while people would have protested, it would have been more like the “debate” that you say you want.  

I honestly wonder if Ms. Waxman truly does not understand why women are so reluctant to report sexual assaults or domestic violence, or why so many women held their tongues until someone finally couldn’t take it any more and had to report it.  And what is the likelihood that a woman suffering one of the most violating, humiliating of crimes really wants “15 minutes of fame” to talk about it?  I stipulate it’s possible, but must believe it’s very rare.  Particularly against a figure that has been almost universally beloved for more than a generation.  Is Stellar kidding about that?  It’s a ridiculous accusation, and insults the pain and suffering of the accusers.  It’s classic, almost a Platonic ideal, of victim blaming.  That she could publish such a piece and then defend it so vehemently is simply astonishing.

And that is what is at issue here, in my opinion.  Waxman’s TheWrap ran with a post that engaged in insulting, denigrating, dismissive victim blaming right from the title onward, and furthermore was easily interpreted to be insulting to any rape victims, not just those who might have been assaulted by Cosby.  (How many different ways can one interpret “Bill Cosby raped me”, other than as a lame attempt at “humor” that insults rape victims everywhere?  It enraged me, and I’m a male who has never experienced rape; I can’t even imagine how it felt to women who have experienced sexual assault.)

In her “apology” and her Twitter remarks, Waxman keeps trying to make the point again and again that the people protesting Stellar’s post don’t want to engage in debate, and that’s simply not the issue at all.  The issue is the way Stellar addressed his point of view, which was horrific.  It’s not unlike when anti-abortionists call pro-choice folks “baby-killers”.  There is debate, and then there is trolling, victim blaming, insulting, and being inflammatory; Stellar’s post was the latter.  It’s not like there aren’t plenty of “independent bloggers” who would be more than happy to write on this topic without being insulting and dismissive.  Why couldn’t The Wrap engage one of them, post it, and stop engaging in straw-man tactics and trying to grab the higher ground of “freedom of speech”?  Because freedom of speech doesn’t mean a WebZine has to publish everyone’s obnoxious, noxious opinions.  You want to publish an opposing viewpoint, go for it.  You want to continue publishing abrasive click bait, and you’ll keep getting castigated.

It’s up to you, Ms. Waxman.  Here’s hoping you have an open mind, and not just a reflexive defense mechanism.

Avoiding Subsidizing Overpaid Ass-Clowns in an A La Carte Consumption World

08 Sunday Jun 2014

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Image courtesy of zenshaman.com

For about half my life, roughly, the media that I consumed was essentially collectivized.  That is to say that everything I saw or read or listened to was from a very limited set of corporate producers.  The individual content was from a huge mass of folks of course, but they were collected under the heading of “The TV Networks” or “The Big Publishers” or “The National Newsweeklies” or “The Big Record Companies” or what have you.

Over time, the collectors changed somewhat–cable and satellite TV became big business; the phone company was broken up, acquired media properties, and started consolidating; big players in one industry (Warner, e.g.) bought big players in other areas (Time, record companies, etc.).  But from the consumer perspective this all had the appears of deck chairs shuffling around on the Titanic; we were all still sailing on the USS Media Collective, where a very limited number of companies controlled a huge percentage of what we these days call “content”.  And it was in the interests of these big media companies to become even bigger, to acquire even more properties, leading us to a place like the current proposed Comcast/Time-Warner merger.

I was thinking of all this recently because of a big push by the New York Times to try to get people to subscribe to just their opinions section.  The New York Times opinion section is immensely popular, so much so that about 10 years back, they tried to put a paywall in the way of people who wanted to read just that content.  And like the vast majority of pay walls, it was a monumental failure and they gave it up.  Now they’re trying again.  But the thing is, I don’t want to pay some monthly subscription fee and get stuck with their idiot columnists like (shudder) David Brooks or Maureen Dowd or cliche-thrower & metaphor mixer Tom Friedman or right-wing anti-sex moron Ross Douthat; I just want to read Paul Krugman whenever I like. So I’m not going to subsidize people I consider overpaid ass-clowns just for that. And I doubt very much I’m alone in that regard.

And this got me thinking about how much the Web era has changed our expectations, how we consume (and want to consume) content, and the effect that’s having on these big–but terrified–media companies.

Big media companies want to continue to force you to purchase things collectively.  You know how it works:  If you want HBO, you have to get a cable or satellite subscription, and you have to pay for some kind of “premium” package, forcing you to buy dozens (or even hundreds) of channels of programming you don’t give a rip about just so you can watch “Game of Thrones” for three months out of the year.  Or you have to get a ruinously-expensive “add-on” package to the premium package if you want to watch, I dunno, hockey or football or whatever beyond what the networks offer “for free”.

It’s the same with newspapers; you may just wants the sports and comics (or in the case of my bff the rocket scientist, the comics and the technology section), but you also have to pay for the ads, the obits, the opinion section, the business section, and whatever else they put in there.  Or in the case of the New York Times and their brilliant new Opinion Subscription strategy, they want me to subsidize people I consider overpaid ass-clowns just to get the one or two people I think are worth actually shelling out dough for.  And every newspaper has that issue to some degree.

Hell, it’s even the same with music; they want you to pay $10-20 for a whole album, not just buy the one song from that album that you’re interested in.  Do you really want the entire “Despicable Me 2” soundtrack, or do you just want “I’m Happy”?  And media companies want you to spend $15 just to get your personal dose of Pherrell.

Now, there are reasonable arguments to be made for forcing people to pay way more than they want for packages of stuff they’re not interested in so as to subsidize quality “minority”-level content.  But about 20 years ago, something funny happened that started us moving toward an a la carte world:  Mosaic, the first legitimate Web browser, was introduced.  And that, combined with the Net Neutrality-induced low bar of entry to publishing content, opened the content floodgates.  Mix in things like Amazon, iTunes, portable media players, iPads, and whatnot, and you have a world where not only are people familiar with buying only what they want, when they want, to consume at their own leisure, they expect it.  People get irked when their favorite podcast is late, or when they can’t download this week’s episode of “Mad Men” the day after it is broadcast.  (Not to mention the insanity of companies like HBO trying to force you to wait nearly a year to watch programming like “Game of Thrones”–a topic I go into in boring detail in other post.)

Now there is an entire generation–a generation as familiar with YouTube and NetFlix and Amazon Instant Video and iTunes as I was with the flavors of Slurpees available at my local neighborhood 7-Eleven–that has grown up with that.  (And don’t even get me started on social media!)  My son doesn’t care that the episodes of MythBusters he’s watching were filmed 7 years ago; my daughter doesn’t give a rip that the Anime she is enjoying were broadcast originally in Japan in 2003; they are products of the Internet age, and don’t care.  And for me, a long-time nerd, that the episode of “Top Gear” I’m watching was made in 2004 matters to me not a whit; it’s still fun to watch.  These are the times we live in, and the big media companies simply don’t get it.

Used to be, when I moved someplace new–and when I lived in Santa Cruz, I did it on an almost-yearly basis–I did three things immediately:  Unpack and set up my stereo, get out all my books and put them on the shelves, and subscribe to my newspaper of choice.  Getting everything else set up took a back seat–even the phone.  But music, books, and news were critical.

Now?  Now, I take out my iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and I have all three immediately.  I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in nearly a decade.  My books are all in boxes.  I don’t even have a stereo.  My entire music and book collection I carry with me all the time, and the news I can access whenever I like, wherever I like.  For the media companies, this is of course a monumental disaster.  For the consumer, it’s unbelievably convenient and wonderful.  Talk about overcoming the PITA principle!

Until such a time as media companies like HBO and Time Warner and Comcast get on board with the fact that not only do we live in an a la carte world, but that denying people that access is counter-productive not only to their business model but also to their bottom line, we’ll continue to get pushed to sign up for things like the New York Times’ new Opinion-section Only Subscription App.  And I’ll say it again:  I doubt I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t want to subsidize overpaid ass-clowns just to get the content I want.

It’s an a la carte world, media companies; time to get over it and move along.  Or you’ll get run over.

 

Lament of the Cable-Cutters

15 Saturday Feb 2014

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Image courtesy of The Telegraph

The Olympics are on.

I love the Winter Olympics, honestly. Sami and I enjoy watching the figure skating together and regaling each other with our (in my case) half-informed opinions on various skaters, techniques, and move difficulties. I have loved the downhill ever since Franz Klammer’s utterly-insane, gold medal, death-defying final run in Innsbruck in 1976, something that literally took my breath away. I love watching the ski jumping, the men (and now finally women!) flying hundreds of feed down the hill, drifting, drifting, seemingly hanging up there forever. The bobsledders, lugers, and nutty skeleton riders, barreling down the hill inches above the ice at speeds that make me nervous when I’m surrounded by more than a ton of metal and plastic. I really love it.

And I would love to watch it. Except that the network that has a monopoly on all the content–NBC in this case–is completely and utterly against people in my minority group.

No, not Jews. Not nerds either, although there is definitely some overlap there. That group is cable-cutters.

Cable-cutters are folks who gave up on cable or satellite subscriptions, and the networks (especially folks like HBO) absolutely hate us. Or at least that’s the way it appears to us, given their behavior. You see, while most shows are available via Amazon Prime or iTunes or other avenues, “special” content–anything HBO puts out, or Big Events like the Stanley Cup or World Series or, yes, the Olympics–are only available if you sign up on an app, and the only way to sign up on that app is . . . to have a cable or satellite account.

Yup, that’s right gang: If you want to watch “Game of Thrones” or the Olympics on your iPad, you are required to have a cable TV account.

Cable and satellite companies hate and fear families like ours. The way cable companies make money is to force you to buy big packages of content, subsidizing all those channels you never watch by making you pay a premium for the stuff you really want. “A la carte” cable packages are anathema to these people; if you could only pick and choose the 5-10 channels you want, they would lose leverage, money, prime deals with various networks, and I don’t know what else. They don’t want that; they want to continue their monopoly on your content by forcing you to watch what they want to sell you, their way. And people like us are a threat to that model.

And yet just like media companies when the VCR first came out, then DVDs, and then digital content, they’re missing the boat. There are millions of us out there now, consuming our video content from out Macbooks or iPads or Android smartphones, and they are writing us–and millions of potential dollars–off their books entirely. Leaving money on the table. And for a lot of people, forcing them to choose between bad options–buying a cable package you don’t want, waiting months or years to get content that is available for everyone else, or pirating it. And as you might guess, by pulling this nonsense, while blatting on about piracy and how much it’s costing them, the media companies are causing many people to choose that over waiting or signing up for cable accounts. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that when folks are pushed into a corner and forced, they don’t like it and lash out. Not very shocking. (The Oatmeal sums up this dilemma quite well.)

I want to watch the Olympics. I am fine with paying for the content; I don’t even mind watching it the way folks watching broadcast TV have to–with endless commercials, blathering analysis by former athletes, and a flood of “up close and personal” clips. But no, that’s not an option. I can either get a cable account (for two weeks of content), go to the local bar or whatever, or pirate it. And for any of those choices, my dollars are left on the table and NBC doesn’t get them.

We are nearly 20 years into the web era, media companies, and a good half-dozen deep into the streaming era. Companies like Netflix are producing shows for people to binge-watch. And you are still trying to force folks to sign up for cable or satellite contracts? Pull yourselves into the future and figure it out, or you’re going to be left behind.

A Word About Tech Writing

15 Tuesday Oct 2013

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Image courtesy of Missouri Southern State University

When people who don’t know me ask what I do, I usually hesitate.  “I’m a writer” is misleading; it causes people to think that I’m a journalist, maybe, or perhaps a novelist, a short-story writer, something like that.  And while I aspire to that, I’m not there yet, and it’s not what I do to earn my daily bread.  “I’m a computer nerd” is safer, but that has its own issues; people usually assume that I’m an engineer, maybe a QA person, in IT perhaps (I’ve never had anyone assume I’m in sales or marketing; I have no idea why–maybe because I don’t wear a tie?).

Unfortunately the honest and easy answer–“I’m a tech writer”–is almost invariably followed by a confused expression on the part of my interlocutor and, if they think I won’t mind, the obvious question, “Oh; and what’s that?”  Which brings me back to the first two answers, only now I combine them:  “I write computer manuals for high tech companies; right now I work for HP.”  (“Oh, how interesting!” people often insincerely say; I appreciate the effort, but I know it sounds boring.)

Despite being a surprisingly-large industry, with college degrees being offered in it, it pretty much flies below the radar.  While my career is not sneered at as much as it was when I first fell into it–and most tech writers do indeed fall into it rather than seeking it out–there are still plenty of people who blame me for, e.g., badly-translated-from-the-Japanese VCR instruction manuals, or poorly-translated-from-Finnish cell phone booklets, or things of that nature.  As I am the first to admit, there is a lot of bad tech writing out there.  I think it is because it requires two separate skill sets that both require years to master, and are almost mutually exclusive in most people:  Being a nerd, and being a good writer.  Most engineers in my experience can’t write a decent English sentence to save their lives, and most writers don’t want to go anywhere closer to nerdly topics than researching them on WikiPedia.  (Though this has changed some in the last 5-10 years.)  With a C.S. degree but some nominal gift at writing, I’m one of the few overlaps.  Hence the huge supply of crappily-written technical documents.  (“I’m only one person,” I often tell folks; “I’m fixing them as fast as I can.”)

But it’s a decent-sized industry.  There are thousands of us out there, all over the country, doing out level best to help you understand how to work your tech.  Where do you think the online help for MS Word comes from?  Those pop-up bubble-help pieces of text you see when you hover over that button that you don’t know what its for.  The text that comes spilling out when you type “Help [whatever]”.  Someone like me.  (And my wife Sami, too.  That’s how we met, in point of fact.)

I mention this because if you’ve been paying attention to the “mainstream media” at all–particularly the print media–in the last 15 years or so (i.e. shortly after the Web really got rolling), journalist and journalism has been engaged in a fairly epic level of navel-gazing, trying to figure out (poorly, for the most part) how to adapt to this Brave New Online World.  And almost invariably, they completely ignore the tech writing industry.  Which on the one hand I can understand–they’re journalists, not tech writers.  But on the other hand, the tech writing biz started wrestling with this issue a good decade before the Web got going.  We have experience with this.  We were only targeting customers who were buying our computers rather than the world at large–SGI computers, Sun Microsystems computers, Windows boxes, what have you–but it was all going online.  I was helping an engineering team design something that looked a lot like the WikiPedia interface, only specific to that company’s computers (it was a small startup you’ve never heard of) . . . in 1992.

I’m not telling you all this to impress you with my knowledge or how far in front of the curve I was, but because when I read posts by people like Noah Davis who talk about the early days of online writing and oh those young innovators while totally ignoring the entire area of tech writing, it makes me want to bang my head against something hard.  To folks like Davis, the idea of an online writer in his or her 40s is mind-boggling, and the thought of one over 50?

What happens when you get to be 45 and don’t have the drive to stay up late and continuously react to flash-in-the-pan online controversies? What does middle age look like on the internet?

The point here is that there is a huge store of earned knowledge out there, and it lives in the heads of tech writers.  And if journalists and other online writers were smart, rather than talk about how the media world is changing and shrinking and how oh no one understand what they’re going through, they might want to consider tapping some of that knowledge, and maybe leveraging it to help themselves for use in their own journalistic areas.

Because let me clue you in, Mr. Davis:  There’s lots of tech writers out there with extensive experience with online writing, and plenty of us are over 45.  We know what “middle age looks like on the internet” because we’ve been there.  For a while now.  So maybe you should consider asking some of us how we managed it.  It would be a lot more productive than writing another navel-gazing article about how tough the online journalism world is, I guarantee you.

More Big Media Company Silliness

01 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by in News, Opinion

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Zachary Quinto’s squinty-face is due to him wondering how Paramount can be so durn dumb, I bet (Photo courtesy of the LA Times)

I have written quite a few times, in my own blog and as a regular poster on the (genuinely excellent tech review and commentary) site Gear Diary about the many stupidities of big media companies, and how many of their decisions increase rather than decrease the piracy they claim to fear so desperately.  I’m not going to rehash those arguments–you can google them up easily, and I think The Oatmeal sums them up perfectly in his cartoon about the unbelievable stupidity exhibited by HBO over “Game of Thrones” which, not to put too fine a point on, you quite literally can’t get legally in digital format for nearly a year after the episodes are broadcast unless . . . you subscribe to a cable company, and sign up for HBO, and sign up for HBO plus.  If HBO thinks that increases signup rates and decreases piracy, they’re deluding themselves.

But today’s rant comes to you courtesy of the upcoming DVD release of the new Star Trek movie.  Gigom notes in their excellent overview that the extras that you get for buying the Blu-ray release vary based on what store you buy them in, and also what country you reside in.  So if you want all the extras for that film–and believe me, I know plenty of Trekkies who will–you can either spend over a hundred bucks getting them legally by buying yourself multiple copies . . . or you can pirate.  And given that Trekkies are, as a group, fairly highly technically sophisticated, I’m guessing they’re not going to shell out more than a hundred smackers to line Paramount’s greedy-ass coffers, but rather will buy one copy and pirate the other extras on ThePirateBay.org or some other bittorrent site.  Because to do otherwise would be, frankly, stupid.

Bit media companies seem to operate based on two assumptions:  That their customers are deeply stupid, and that everyone wants to pirate and no one wants to pay.  Both these assumptions are fatally flawed, and the combination of them is what brings us to this pass, where media companies find their profit margins shrinking and respond by engaging in practices that will simultaneously drive up piracy and decrease their income.  Good plan, that, media companies!

You would think, nearly 20 years into the Web era, that big media companies would have learned how to adjust by now.  You would be wrong.