For those at my presentation yesterday, who wanted a copy of the presentation, I have put it on Slideshare. Or you can see it embeded below.
If you were not at my session in Paris, the presentation won’t necessarily make a huge amount of sense because it is a presentation designed to illustrate a talk, rather than be viewed.
Rupert Murdoch’s last great battle, getting people to pay for on-line content, has been much discussed. The general view is that he will not win. As I have previously said, the issue is not that people won’t pay for content, it is that they won’t pay for distribution, when distribution is free. Here is some more evidence that he is heading for a fall.
Speaking recently to the National Press Club at the George Washington University he asserted that people will pay for content when they “have nowhere else to go” i.e. when everyone else is also charging for content. However, this is never going to happen: not because other content providers won’t collude with Murdoch and also erect paywalls around their content, but because people already have somewhere else to go and this place is not a newspaper or other form of institutionalised news provider. This is why newspapers are dying, not because newspapers’ content is available free in the digital space. The institution of a newspaper is being replaced by the process of information sharing using the tools of social media.
The people who have nowhere else to go are newspaper proprietors – not consumers.
I have not shown a tendency to be charitable to journalists in many of my previous posts – because so few really understand what is going on with social media. But here is an exception, from the blog of Ben Goldacre of The Guardian, reflecting on how social media changes PR. It is spot on.
With the internet, page space is infinite, and people will post any old nonsense on the grounds that it might be interesting to someone somewhere (and I’m very glad of it). There are bloggers, of course, who will get inexplicably fascinated by a single issue, and follow-up every development, no matter how obscure. But there are also random passers-by, who might use Google to double check your utterances on Twitter, in 10 seconds, while they wait for the kettle to boil, just out of interest. Then they might post the results, with a single keystroke, on Twitter, in a blog comment, just because it adds a little to the story, and someone else might find that, and build on it, and so on. I’m rambling, but I do think it’s interesting how the web makes the environment very different for everyone in PR who hopes that vagueness and disinterest will smooth over their rougher edges.
The power of nonsense (or as I prefer to call it, information of very niche interest). Trust that is grounded in process – not institutionalised assertions. The ability to publish no longer a scarce resource – and therefore liberated from the grip of institutionalised control. It is all in that quote, even if Goldacre himself may not quite realise it.
@obionyeaso recently asked me for a view on this by David Gelles and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in the FT – essentially will the iPad / Kindle shatter the book publishing business in the way the iPod and iTunes shattered the music business.
My short answer would be no – it won’t. The short reason for this is that the form of content that is a book is very well adapted to the form of distribution that is printed and bound bits of paper. This is unlike news, which is not necessarily well adapted to the form of distribution that is newspaper, or the music track which we have discovered is very poorly adapted to the form of distribution that is an album or CD. At the same time a book is an important cultural feature in the way that a CD, album or even a newspaper is not. Continue reading
Google have just come out with a a New Shiny Tool – and I haven’t got time to really analyse it at the moment. Does it take us a step closer to my “Mythical One Place” – i.e. a tool that recognises that a social media citizen needs to do three things – produce stuff, consume stuff and share stuff – across multiple places and platforms but all from one place? Not sure – in the interim check out the ever reliable Mashable for an assessment.
This is something I’ve not done before – posting a comment. But hey, it took a while to write and the social media revolution is all about the separation of information from a dedicated means of distribution, so that’s alright then.
The comment was on a post by Dan Gillmor, which was really just a link to Alan Rusbridger’s recent speech about the future of journalism. I think my comment makes sense without first reading the speech – but I recommend you do read it. It is very good, albeit a speech that doesn’t really nail the answer – probably because the answer involves arriving at the conclusion that journalists have little role in the future of journalism.
Here is my comment. Continue reading
Yesterday was Apple iPad day – and what a let down it was. After all the hype it turned out to be just a big iTouch.
What Apple (usually) does really well is take something that already exist and make it sexy and so much easier to use. It turned MP3 players into iPods. It turned phones / PDAs into iPhones. So there was me waiting for it to turn the laptop / netbook into … what? Continue reading