All Wired Up

Both this weeks readings make bold claims for free being the business model of the future. I want to believe.

Like Chris Anderson says in his Wired article, the cost of distributing digital content to the consumer is so minuscule, just 1% of customers who choose to pay for an item can cover the 99% that don’t.

This model has recently worked in the music industry (I see a pattern emerging here), with first Radiohead and later Nine Inch Nails discovering that this formula is also a viable way to sell music. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails put the first 9 songs of his 4 disc instrumental album, Ghosts I-IV online for a free download. Fans could pay $5 for a high-quality download of the complete 36-track album or fork out even more for limited edition Cd’s. Because he didn’t have to give anything to record companies, Reznor made more from the online download than he did from his biggest selling traditional album, The Downward Spiral.

Reznor is an artist that is embracing the idea of free digital content in many interesting ways. Not only did he purposely leak his music to notorious torrent sharing site, The Pirate Bay, he actually gave away his most recent album The Slip, in its entirety, completely for free (and it’s bloody good to). In addition, he has set up remix.nin.com where fans can remix any of his songs and post them on the site for rating, downloading and sharing. He also started his own film festival on Youtube where fans could use songs from Ghosts I-IV to create a short film.

Thanks for staying with me, I do have a point. Reznor has done all this as part of the Creative Commons movement, yet another exciting element of the freenomenon, not really mentioned in the readings. Creative Commons lets artists apply their own copyright and choose whether they want it to be in the public domain (ie. free to use by anyone) or place a ‘rights reserved’ on it (permission needs to be sought to use it). Basically they offer their intellectual property for free, so long as the original artist is credited.

Sorry if this has been all about the music industry and not much about journalism. But I think what Reznor is doing ties in with the free content debate nicely. I promise to be more journalistic based next week… maybe.

P.S I hate word counts!

Two-thirds the number of newspaper readers now read blogs. Does this pose a threat to the future of Journalism? Well, only for advertisers and marketing dinosaurs who can’t adapt to the changing face of the media.

All this talk of the death of the newspaper reminds me of when the record industry went all Chicken Little, screaming the sky was falling in a thunder-storm of free music all over their profits. Napster and Kazaa (now replaced by Bittorrent) were letting people get music for free-a problem for sure. But what did the record industry do? Sweet F.A. They wasted all their time suing people and crying over ever-decreasing album sales. This made room for ITunes. Apple saw oppurtunity in the change instead of doom and well, the rest is a fruity piece of history.

A similar thing is happening to Journalism, except it’s not illegal to download free news (yet). Blogs and online news are filling the role that newspaper no longer can… providing instant news and opinion. Basically, the role of newspapers has changed to one of analysis, rather than breaking the story.

‘Citizen Journalism‘ though, is an entirely new thing. There are two-types of CJ’s -the eyewitness with a camera or mobile who gets that one-in-a-million shot of something huge, and the professional, one-man newsroom.

Check this out: Steve Garfield from The Uptake (a video-journalist website) beats CNN to a scoop about 2008 Presidential candidate, Duncan Hunter and explains how he streams news live from his mobile phone…

Steve Garfield – Citizen Journalist, beats CNN to their scoop

and just for fun:

I read Stephen’s article on and off over a period two weeks. It took me this long because I had trouble concentrating enough to do it all in one session. A sign, I suppose, of my ever-dwindling ability to focus on small black text on white-space. According to Quinn, I’m not the only one…

My generation, the dreaded Gen-Y, are constantly accused of ‘wanting it all and wanting it now’. In a soulless rush for instant gratification, we shun literature, academic texts, newspapers, even road signs. Hell, anything that takes more than 30 seconds of concentration just isn’t on our radar. We don’t even have respect for the English language. Instead, we replace it with ‘txtspeak’. It saves valuable time when we’re breaking our thumbs trying to txt frantic msgs 2 our m8s u c?

In all seriousness though, now more than ever, time is money. I don’t know about anyone else, but I just can’t imagine having the luxury of sitting down and reading my favourite newspaper everyday. In fact, when I think about it, I hate newspapers, in the traditional paper format anyway.

Here’s how I get my news on a normal working day:

I shoot a quick glance at the headline of someone else’s newspaper on the train.

I get to work, bring up Google News and see what interest me. The best thing about Google is that I can see what’s happening and then choose which newspaper’s version I want to read. I’m not confined to just one paper’s version.

If I’ve got the time, I prefer to read features rather than front-page news, so i pop on over to Arts and Letters Daily. A&L conveniently source all the worthy features from newspapers all around the globe and put them all together so I can point-and-click as I choose.

After that I check my RSS feed from Metacritic which does a smiliar thing as A&L -gathering music, film, video game and TV reviews from media all over the globe and bringing them together on the one page.

Astute readers will notice a pattern here. I like my news and information condensed, or i guess you could say ‘converged’. I don’t necessarily read less than the broadsheet-brethren, I just want my information presented to me in an easily digestible format that I can customise to suit my needs.

Basically, I don’t want to read my news in a format that requires arms the size of Mr Tickle to read.

Mr Tickle: Avid reader of The Age