Can design save the newspaper?
ted.com
ted.com
Would you invest?
So if you change the question to, would you invest in a designer who had a track record of boosting circulation by 20-100% in two years time?
TED is great in its way, but it caters to, some would say flatters, an elite crowd of people - the type who buy expensive artwork for their houses - some of the stuff proposed there might sound great to the chardonnay-class participants but has little relevance in the real world.
Can design save the newspaper? Of course not, and merely raising the question with a straight face impressively demonstrates the out-of-touch, ivory tower, art-gallery-opening-attending disconnect of the speaker.
Such a question is, in my opinion, at least as prima facie ridiculous as posing that interpretive dance might save NASA, so the parent's comment is an entirely valid reductio ad absurdum.
"Design" in this sense goes far beyond "graphic embellishment" and is actually about changing the entire product/company involved -- and thus very relevant to the future of newspapers.
A few quotes from his speech:
"It was my personal, intimate challenge to talk to the readers."
"the changes we made were not about changing the look, it was about changing the product completely"
"my bosses wondered, why is he asking all these business questions, why is he not showing us pages? This is the new role of the designer, to be in this process from the beginning to end."
Mr. Utko recognizes that design cannot create a 20 to 100 percent increase in circulation. He isn't claiming that it can. He claims that if you "put your work to the highest possible level," you can pull off changes as successful as his.
I agree with your statement about TED, but this does not exemplify the "disconnect" of TED. It's ignorant to claim that his ideas are not relevant in the real world, since they very obviously increased circulation.
The most important slide from the presentation showed a Taijitu (yin and yang) diagram and made the following comparison: function is to form as content is to design.
Decided to follow up on my blog with a vignette: http://justindz.tumblr.com/post/91601837/this-is-sam-he-work...
Why would we want to save the newspaper?
Newspapers are one of our oldest media. There's an entire infrastructure of mythology built around them that will be difficult to replace overnight. That's one reason why everyone finds it so easy to make glib generalizations like "the death of newspapers will herald a big increase in corruption". This isn't a rational statement. [1] It's a statement of religious faith, akin to the belief that atheists can't make moral judgements because they don't go to church on a regular basis.
But, more charitably, and to return to your point: Yeah, we should have at least some sympathy for the people who don't know about Firefox, or can't use it for some reason. The prisoners of corporate IT are people, too. The people who can't understand their Windows box are people, too. And the folks who are losing their jobs in journalism and have no idea what to do next are in legitimate distress.
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[1] I mean, where's the controlled experiment? The last time a case of corruption happened in an era without newspapers was three hundred years ago. Unless you're a really well-read Latin student or a Renaissance historian, every case of corruption you've ever heard of happened in spite of the existence of newspapers.
Of course, if you hand-pick the data you can prove any point you like. There have certainly been many heroic acts of journalism. But there have also been many shameful acts of journalism, and one hell of a lot of mediocrity. I'd wager that for every great investigative journalist there have been a hundred mindless stenographers, several dozen shameless toadies, and at least one William Randolph Hearst. And that's without even getting into Pravda or (pace Godwin) Joseph Goebbels.
Take a look at the front page of a common "new media" blog: http://dailykos.com/
As of this moment, about 18 out of the 20 posts are using old media (almost always newspapers) as a source, with the bloggers' total contribution being opinion. Picture that same blog, and every other source of information on the web, without the dead tree reporters. There's a serious void threatening there.
But this is like arguing that, if Internet Explorer stopped working tomorrow, 90% of web users would be out of commission for years. Whereas, in fact, if IE stopped working tomorrow there would be a brief panic for a day or two until the world's techies, armed with handfuls of installation media for Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera, filled in the gap. After which things would continue much as before. (Except that many websites would be cheaper to build and would work better. But let's not get into that. ;)
There would be several years of intense pain on the edges as various people and companies who have tied themselves too closely to the IE codebase scrambled to adapt to the new world. But in ten years nobody would even remember IE, just as few people today remember Lotus 1-2-3.
Of course today's blogs depend on dead-tree reporters. Dead-tree reporting is available in abundance -- indeed, in many niches there is a massive surplus of it -- because it is subsidized by steady outside sources of revenue derived (in part) from monopolies on local advertising. It was hard to compete against that subsidy, while it lasted. But that subsidy is smaller now, and shrinking. [1] And we just don't know what happens next.
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[1] Though, in fact, I don't think it is gone. The death of print media may be greatly exaggerated. It's hard to tell the difference between an extinction-level event and an event that will reduce the population by a mere 85% when you're in the middle of it. And simple mismanagement has a lot to do with the newspapers' current plight.
What's left are the dregs. They can't justify their existence, and so they're disappearing. Clay Shirky's piece on the nature of technological shift is particularly enlightening ( http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking... ).
If there is a market for the product, as you suggest their is, then let them pay to enjoy it. If not, so be it.
Orgs like http://www.npr.org/about/ are paid for by the public, using a distributed model. There are local stations that are paid for locally, who in turn help fund the umbrella organization of NPR. Likewise there are private individuals who have left endowments or other contributions to maintain NPRs independence.
Journalism is alive and well. Corporate journalism is dying. And i can't say i'm hugely sorry. Sucks that the industry has crashed as opposed to transitioning, but i can't say that it wasn't at least in part their own fault.
What matter is it the medium you choose?
This is what has happened to news. The internet has made the price of distribution dirt cheap, but content-production is the same price as ever. And so content will be spread thin. You'll read CNN.com's national news for free, rather than read about the local Rotary club at $1.50 an issue. Seems sensible, except: In aggregate, local happenings are more important than national.
Check the list of startups over at http://jstartup.com/categories/7673-startups
Here in Chicago, The Windy Citizen, my local news startup has just hired its first ad rep. We're basically a local Digg, loosing connecting together all the little local sites in the city through links and buttons. People are going to keep starting little local news sites. We're here to help them get that first 500 readers they need to get off and running.
And? Obviously then, people don't prefer more expensive Fords. That's how the free market works after all.
Point is, if people don't want to pay for news on paper, so be it.
>Seems sensible, except: In aggregate, local happenings are more important than national.
Now, if this is true, then there will be plenty of people willing to show this by paying for local news, online or otherwise.
You don't know how it will be done. I don't know how it will be done. But nevertheless, similar miracles happen every day; there are millions of examples of this sort of thing occurring, it is not the exception. One of the most intriguing things about markets is that they can be smarter than any given participant. (This is part of why they can become hard to regulate; they are as good at outsmarting regulation as evolved programs can be, in much the same way.) Bounding what the market is capable of by your comprehension or your credulity is not the path to understanding.
In truth, it is not that there is no possible way to bring them together, the problem is that there are a staggering number of ways to bring the supply and demand together and nobody knows what is best. It seems unlikely that newspapers are the answer, though.
Unregulated capitalism is an extremist form of economic system. There are no answers to be found in extremism.
The answers to our problems will found somewhere in the middle of the range between unregulated capitalism on one extreme end of the spectrum and socialist economics at the other extreme end of the spectrum.
Government oversight of markets. Elimination of monopolies. A voice for the employees. etc. In this case, there will probably be some donated money and some government money going to a public journalism system similar to public broadcasting.
Governments can't do new things. They usually can't conceive of them, and if they can, they can't get them past committee.
The old system isn't working. Pouring more government money into it has no realistic prospect of working. For one thing, how can the "fourth estate" function as a watchdog if they're getting too much of their money from the people they're supposed to be watching? Your only hope of something that actually works is a truly new system, and the government can't come up with that.
But the market can, even if you can't think of what that may be and if I can't think of what it may be. It's not blind faith, every niche works that way. The government did not create the auto industry. The government did not create the electronics industry; it did not create the RAM industry or the CPU industry or the video card industry. It did not create the insurance industry, it did not create the furniture industry. It did not create just-in-time delivery or Amazon.com. These all came from supply on one side figuring out how to reach demand on the other, with all sort of creative chaos in the middle (and ongoing) that could never have been legislated into existence. (It can, on the other hand, be legislated out of existence.)
Why should the government prop up the current system instead of letting something new happen?
Nothing in my post had anything to do with "unregulated capitalism". It's simply how the economy works, and without this critical understanding, not only can you not go forward, you can not understand how we got where we are.
Libertarian economics policy advocates utterly fail to recognize that when money is laying around with no regulations/regulators protecting that money, people steal that money.
I don't know why libertarians can't figure out people steal money that is left around unguarded, but they just don't comprehend that fact.
Since Bush did no such thing....
> Libertarian economics policy advocates utterly fail to recognize that when money is laying around with no regulations/regulators protecting that money, people steal that money.
Libertarians recognize that govts don't protect money all that well and that big thefts always involve a govt.
No, Adam503 chooses to misinterpret "letting the market figure it out" as unregulated capitalism so that (s)he can go off on a more-or-less entirely unrelated rant.
What letting the market figure it out really means here is that instead of a glorious upper authority picking the "winner" by handing out government funds to a proven-loser business model to prop it up ("winner" hardly seems like the right word), that we unleash the creativity of thousands or millions of people in the confident belief that where there is unmet demand, someone will find a way to supply it.
Did you think my example list was just randomly tossed in there or something? It's the core of the point; government action can only look to the past. Your actions will simply guarantee the extinction of journalism, because the system you want to prop up is dying before competition even fully matures, which is the ultimate proof of economic death.
What regulations you may or may not want to lay down on such actions is an entirely separate point, and if you can't see that, you're simply being willfully blind to the point I'm making because you've been so conditioned in your response to the word "capitalism" that you can't see past it anymore. The fact that Amazon.com created a new meeting point for supply and demand is neither here nor there in the question of whether they are regulated (hint: yes).
Again... this sort of thing has happened millions of times. It's not a wacky theory, it's how we got from the dark ages to the economy of today. (The wacky theory is that this creation is impossible and only happens when central authorities help it along; this flatly contradicts the historical facts.) This time is only different because now the town crier is facing disruption, and he's being loud about it. Other than that, it's hardly different than any other industry which has been transformed over the past 50 years, which is most of them.
and the New York Times....
> and the economic collapse we are currently experiencing.
Nope, but that's other threads.
> Elimination of monopolies.
With one exception, the US govt hasn't broken a monopoly while it was still a monopoly. And, in that case (Standard Oil), the break up took out the low-cost-to-the-consumer supplier, resulting in increased prices....
That was, of course, proven to be complete and utter nonsense with evidence people like Seymour Hersh, Amy Goodman, etc. had at the time of that vote. That information was not provided to the American people by any of the major outlets of corporate-owned media.
How do you think that happened?
You're cherry-picking your "small market" sources. The vast majority are cranks.
People will still pay for content, and hence someone will still get paid to produce content, but the simple fact is that traditional newspapers can't compete as a distribution medium with other, newer, mediums.
Businesses and people pay(less often than they use to but they still pay) for that delivery. Not enough people pay for journalism, we're too shortsighted and selfish. But we are willing to pay for vanity and to make money. This is why papers aren't going away anytime soon.
as an engineer/hacker, i think its pretty clear that design is important. its cold, hard facts that people like something that is visually appealing. the issue is, though, that this is a community of hackers, and so we're all mostly poor at artistic design, nor are we particularly interested in it, so we don't talk about it.
its definitely interesting, and this meshes well with the community because its a discussion on the numbers of how design works.
just my $0.02, though
Reporters aren't even interested. They just believe that going to the web equals death.