All posts by Paul Raven

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Page-views as metric of journalistic quality

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GalleyCat quotes a speech at the Copyright Clearance Centre’s copyright conference by Gaby Darbyshire, Gawker Media’s COO of finance, legal, operations & business development, in which she discussed the recent change in pay structure wherein Gawker writers are remunerated in proportion to the page-views garnered by the articles they authored:

“When we started paying our writers by the page-view (bonuses based on page-views), everybody started talking about how there would be a race to the bottom–how we’d be writing about nothing except Paris Hilton sex tapes. The absolute opposite has occurred, because at the end of the day, you don’t get a sustained growth in audience [and] in the success of your content, without producing quality.”

She concluded: “What our writers discovered–even though they were scared to start with (they were like, ‘oh my god, we have to find big scoop-y stories)–was that the diligently researched feature type good stuff that’s original and new; that’s what works. That’s what they are incentivized to produce, and we can measure exactly what is successful and what is not–which newspapers, by the way, never could, because you don’t know who is throwing away what section of the paper.”

It’s evidently safe to say that the policy hasn’t done Gawker’s traffic stats any harm… but the issue here is one’s definition of quality*. If quality writing is simply ‘writing that ever-greater numbers of people want to read’, then I guess Gawker has found the secret recipe for success.

I suppose it marks me as some sort of intellectual elitist, but I’m inclined to think that quality and popularity are not correlative in that particular way… which sits awkwardly at odds with my general belief in market forces. If there had never been a market for quality journalism, then we’d never notice having less of it; on the other hand, if we can recognise (or at least worry about) a decline in the amount of quality journalism available, that implies there’s still a demand for it, albeit in smaller volume than the demand for titillating tabloid gossip. It’s all very well chasing “scoop-y” stories, but a scoop about Paris Hilton isn’t of the same worth as a scoop about, say, government corruption, corporate misdeeds and so on. Not in my world, anyway.

An therein lies the rub. It’s different strokes for different folks, in other words; if all you want is page-views and the ad revenue they bring, then by all means write for page-views, because the readers are hungry. Personally, that editorial approach turns me right off (the only Gawker property I follow is Lifehacker, and even that’s been in something of a decline since Gina Trapani stepped away from the steering-wheel), so the question is whether the simple page-views model will work for ‘quality’ journalism… and if it won’t (as seems to be the case), how should it compete with populist sensationalism?

Surely, if web publishing has such superior feedback and analysis data by comparison to print as Darbyshire suggests, there must be a way to make it pay and scale… unless the cynics are right, and proper investigative journalism really has always been subsidised by celebrity gossip and scaremongering.

[ * Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, anyone? ]

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Cleaning up for Street View

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Google Street View camera arrayThe city of Windsor in Ontario, Canada has apparently requested Google reshoot some of its Street View footage in order to remove a murder scene (complete with Do Not Cross police tape barriers and bloody bandages) from the public record, prompting Mike Masnick of TechDirt to wonder…

[… whether] towns and cities are going to start to “prepare” for Google Street View cars coming through and make sure that everyone is on their best behavior…

Seems pretty likely, doesn’t it? [image by sfmine79]

The threat of being seen without one’s “make-up” on has always been around. For instance, I can still remember the way every school I ever attended spent a week gussying the place up and drilling the students in advance of the government inspectors, which was probably one of my earliest cognitive dissonance awakenings – what was the point of inspections if they only occurred after a metaphorical wash’n’brush-up? Why not just, y’know, improve things generally rather than making a last-minute effort once a year*?

This feeds into the idealistic notion that ubiquitous transparency is a good thing, I suppose: if every city (or school, or whatever) knew it could be inspected (or Street View’d) at any time without warning, then perhaps they’d be more likely to fix problems at the root cause instead of sweeping the problems under the rug before the visitors arrive.

Of course, that’s a massive oversimplification of a very complex issue, but the Windsor story is a harbinger of institutional panics yet to come; much as technology could enable nation-states to turn themselves into panopticons, the spotlight can also be pointed in the other direction. The next few decades will be all about the struggle between individuals and corporate or geo-political entities to filter and control their realities as presented to the rest of the world… which is why I’m fairly convinced that augmented reality will be the multi-planar battlefield of manifold and fractal ideological struggles between citizens, states and corporations.

[ * The answer is very obvious now, of course, with the benefit of experience (and the cynicism toward institutions and bureaucracy that it engenders), but for a naive and nerdy seven year old, it was a baffling condundrum. Pity my poor parents attempting to explain these moral grey areas and fundamental societal flaws to a child with no better an instinctive or empathetic grasp of human nature than the Borg… ]

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Downtime

Just a quick note to say that there’ll be no posts from yours truly here at Futurismic for the rest of this week, as I’m off for a long weekend away from the computer in the company of The Lady and a fistful of books I’ve been itching to read for ages.

I’ll be doing my best to keep up with comment moderation (yay for the WordPress for Android app!), but I hope you’ll understand if I don’t treat it as my first priority… after all, I bruise easily, and The Lady has a right hook to be reckoned with. If you’re short of reading material in the meantime, why not visit some of the free fiction venues in the ol’ Sidebar Of Justice?

Whatever you do, have fun – hope to see you again next week. 🙂

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New business models in transmedia storytelling

The TechDirt gang have pointed out an interesting experiment in monetizing storytelling across multiple media platforms from movie house Zen Films:

It’s not a requirement for the audience to consume all media – only that they enjoy whichever one they have right now. Now, given all the attention we’re giving to the fact that there are three media and that they represent three perspectives on the same story, if someone enjoys the novella I think it’s likely they’ll watch the webisodes and vice verse.

So, there are no particular calls-to-action within each media except the plot points and the twists and turns of a great story which I think will motivate people to get a different perspective on events – who’s telling the truth?

The story is being written by the award-winning crime thriller writer Simon Wood and I’ve left him alone now to continue writing while I’ve turned my attention to the money.

Step 4b – Getting Paid

All the media will be free to read and watch online. It will be released episodically – possibly two episodes a week (Tues and Thurs) maybe weekly… But from the first episode we’ll be selling the whole story so you don’t have to wait.

I believe that reading a book (or Kindle) or watching a DVD on the TV is still very popular and often more convenient than doing the same online. I’m hoping that audiences are going to pay for that.

As with all such things, only time will tell… but people are trying to break the mould, and that means something will give eventually. I’ve noticed quite a few serialisation projects in the genre fiction world of late – Shadow Unit, for instance, or the latest donation-supported Marla Mason material from Futurismic alumnus Tim Pratt, to name but a couple – but what new levels of interest might a cross-media experiment produce?

What if Shadow Unit started doing some video episodes and extras alongside the written fiction, and posting them to a branded channel on YouTube, for instance? And before you mention the problems of budgeting for video, bear in mind that extremely low production values can actually be exploited as a unique selling point in their own right… if you’re not afraid of people calling you out on shameless altermodernity, that is.

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ereaders: an ecological argument

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From Sam Jordison of The Guardian: what difference do ebooks make to a reader’s carbon footprint?

I’ve only managed to find one report – on the Kindle (by The Cleantech Group) – but it backs up suggestions that so long as e-readers are used as book replacements rather than supplements, they soon start to pay back in carbon terms. The report states that a book uses up “approximately 7.46 kilograms of CO2 over its lifetime” and that the Kindle produces “roughly 168 kg” during its lifecycle, making it “a clear winner against the potential savings: 1,074 kg of CO2 if replacing three books a month for four years; and up to 26,098 kg of CO2 when used to the fullest capacity of the Kindle.”

[…]

However, I parted company with Ritch’s positive view of e-readers when she suggested a further advantage: “the consumer who purchases an ebook often has the rights to use it on five or more devices, meaning multiple users within a household would not have to purchase multiple physical versions of a book.” I’d actually view that as a problem, as far as fiction goes. Five or more devices probably gives the ebook a lifespan of little more than 10 years if my experience with such machines is anything to go by – and that’s if you don’t share it. A book (so long as it stays together) can be shared with hundreds of people over hundreds of years.

I also have concerns about the supply side. There’s no information available about the energy required to run Amazon’s “whispernet” and it’s hard to work out the amount involved in supplying other books for download. The internet is too often thought of as a cost-free resource in carbon terms – but it’s recently been suggested that Google alone produces as much as some nation states. Ritch suggested a good comparison would be that “a physical book purchased by a person driving to the bookstore creates twice the emissions of a book purchased online.” But of course, that depends on someone driving rather than walking to the shop.

In short, I think the ecological argument for ereaders is a non-starter for either side, though that could change with time (especially once ereading becomes a software matter rather than a dedicated hardware platform matter. What do you reckon?