What is the future of the newspaper industry? The music industry!

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The same economic drivers that are disrupting the newspaper industry, indeed any industry built on the distribution and packaging of creative acts that can be transmitted digitally, on the Internet, are the same.

I don’t think it’s all that different whether you are talking about newspapers, music, radio, TV, or movies.

Musicians have been the canary in the coal mine for some time now. These past few years they have been finding new ways to fund their art and reach fans and new audiences. God knows the previous arrangement’s math didn’t favor them anyway.

The important thing – from records, to 8-tracks, to cassettes, to CDs, and now to mp3s, it’s the music that survives.

And it is going to thrive. No matter what naysayers may believe. The industry, on the other hand, has been and continues to be transformed. The economics have irrevocably been changed.

This while the news paper industry is still flailing about. In some instances working to produce less of its core product, in pursuit of profit.

Then again, what is the product? Is it the package (CDs in the music industry, the morning paper in the newspaper industry), or what is contained within?

The web presents a true medium to re-invigorate democracy. It’s a participatory architecture, built for collaboration and communication above all else. Every person that is on the web expands its usefulness, and presenting new opportunities to connect, converse and share.

So if you consider the product of the papers news and opinion, you’ll see the monolithic fourth estate crumbling as either a sign for alarm or celebration. With us barbarians at the gates. Unlimited choice, simple to use tools to find and share information and opinion, being the unintentional weapons.

The primary difference between losing the music industry and losing the work of newspapers is that we still need systems to research, filter, and present the news in a way that is beneficial in our lives. For our livelihoods. There are dire consequences to democracy, if we continue down a path of more media, less news and not find systems for people to deal with the ever growing fire house of information we are hit with day in and day out. I think we are already feeling some of the effects.

There is hope. But the choice for the newspaper industry remains as stark as Kent Newsome laid out for the music industry – find new business models or hold on as tight as you can until the well dries up.

Some in the industry know this already and are facing the future with open eyes and open minds. The new, local ownership of Philadelphia’s largest dailies might result in nimbler, more responsive, more participatory media. And conversations are underway exploring new infrastructures to support acts of journalism.

Others? Well hopefully Nick Lemanns of the world learn to recognize that the best way to move reporters to the web is to embrace the web as the participatory media it is. That the web, while offering challenges, presents terrific needs that journalists can fulfill. But it requires building bridges. And fast.

In-depth journalism requires legal, financial and information infrastructure. No one has solved these issues in a way that leverages the participatory nature of the web and has solved the funding equation. That’s why efforts like NewAssignment.Net are so crucial. Its work to put together a path is one to watch, and one to take part in. Tools like Memeorandum and Bloglines, along with plumbing like RSS and Atom, along with participatory news filters like Slashdot, Digg, Newsvine, IndyMedia and Philly Future, early news magazine efforts like Salon, Slate and Suck, and early newspaper efforts, many of which are lost to the nineties dot com crash, provide us with additional lessons to learn from. Not to mention the millions of blogs, and social networking users, many who have participant loyalty, that for some, rivals the relationships newspapers have forged with their readers. And what about Wikipedia?. These early efforts will help lead the way, but that’s no reason to sit on your hands. In this environment, those that wait too long for others to lead, will die.

Other stories of note this weekend:

Washington Post: An Eye for Cool, and Cash: Social news sites paying people to write. Imagine that!

paidContent: Advertisers Will Follow Audiences

NYTimes: What-Ifs of a Media Eclipse: Knight Ridder was ahead of the Internet curve, back in 1996. It even beat a threat from Microsoft (Sidewalk) remember. What happened?

Three weeks ago I asked Yahoo! Answers how to shrink gun violence in Philadelphia

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Did I get a decent answer? Judge for yourself. It was, understandably a question with many dimensions and having no easy answer whatsoever. That’s why I asked it. What I found fascinating however, was that some gave it a shot anyway. And if there is to be any solution or set of solutions, open discussion will be a major part of it.

There is a small work flow issue with Yahoo! Answers. Unanswered questions that linger do not get the visibility they might require and as such, do not get the number of answer attempts as new question submissions do.

David Armano: “you can only influence as many people as you have access to”

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influence_2.gifThis graphic is one a great many clarifying ones you’ll find on David Armano’s Logic+Emotion. His “Visualizing the Social Network” is on my wall at work to trigger conversation.

Some are going to look at this graphic and see a suggestion that the blogosphere is a “pyramid scheme”. On the other side of the fence, this particular post is bound to upset certain myth pushers. When I see it, I can’t help but think it upholds both Shirky’s Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail and well almost every list on Technorati (just replace “authority” with “influence”).

I’ve made the point before that what linkage helps bestow a blog (linkage alone isn’t enough) isn’t authority (no one has authority on the web), but “attention influence”. The thing to note is the importance of the number of links is relative to the community of interest. If you work within a small niche, then having just two or three inbound links by fellows participating in your niche will go a long way to have voice there. As Jeff Jarvis says, small is the new big. He’s right.

Dave Rogers puts it like like this:

It’s a competitive world, and the blogosphere is no different. Some people have little stomach for competition. I’m ambivalent about it myself. If I have to play, I play to win. I’m not playing this game. If you want to have a large audience and be influential, you have act like a jackass sometimes to get attention, much like a certain high attention-earning weblogger whose initials begin with the same letter that jackass starts with. There’s no shortage of that going on. You have to kiss up and piss down. You’d think that it would help if you’re intelligent and write well, but there are quite a few high attention-earners who exhibit neither of those qualities. A gift for the good snark or sly put-down helps. Or maybe you can make scribbles, or wear a skirt (that only helps if you’re a male). It helps if you have A-list patrons who’ll transmit trust and authority to you. It also helps if you flog the popular memes, and endorse the ideas and metaphors of the A-list. Taking off your clothes has helped some. You can be a contrarian, but you’ll get a ration of shit from the conventional authorities who will call you names and invite you to sit down and shut up, so come to that party with a thick skin.

In short, you’ll pretty much have to sell your soul. But, if you work really hard at all that, and are more than a little bit lucky, you’ll have your audience, your influence and your authority. Maybe you’ll have your dignity, but that seems like an optional commodity these days. I guess the thinking is that you earn that back once you make the mainstream media circuit.

Now, some of the earliest bloggers didn’t have to sell their souls. They earned their trust and authority when there was relatively little competition, and some of them sound as though they don’t like the game much anymore either. But you already know the problem with the rat race – only the rats win.
Welcome to the world.

Where I differ with Dave is that I believe that by being true to your niche, your community of interest, by being real, you stand a far more likely chance to reach out and connect with others. But this is a difference in opinion over tactics, not need.

Wayne’s World – Seriously

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Finding the old Wayne’s World trailer on YouTube was sublime.

Don’t you think the story line – new medium enables amature to reach many, the amature gets lured by money and power the big corps offer, disillusion follows, and wisdom (well that’s one of the endings) results – timely?

It both marked the end of the 80s metal subculture I grew up in, and foretold the rise in participatory media.

New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin thought the idea of “Wayne and Garth’s late-night, public-access television show, the one they do from the sofa in Wayne’s basement, is so good that a wily television executive (Rob Lowe) will scheme to exploit their commercial potential” strained the movie’s credibility.

Heh. No foresight that one.

Latest Philly Future Featured Blog

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We’re going to try and encourage something new in our community when we feature a blog on Philly Future – to encourage the community to link to, comment on, and post about it. This is an attempt at expanding the conversation online and further opening up the web to new voices.

Details are here.

If anyone in the web outside of Philly would like to participate, all it takes is tagging your post.

Our latest featured blog is Welcome to Phillyville.

Inspired by threads at Antonella Pavese and The Bb Gun.

Getting the Technorati tag active: .

The music industry targets guitar tablature sites for shutdown

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NYTimes: Now the Music Industry Wants Guitarists to Stop Sharing:

The Internet put the music industry and many of its listeners at odds thanks to the popularity of services like Napster and Grokster. Now the industry is squaring off against a surprising new opponent: musicians.

In the last few months, trade groups representing music publishers have used the threat of copyright lawsuits to shut down guitar tablature sites, where users exchange tips on how to play songs like “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” “Highway to Hell” and thousands of others.

The battle shares many similarities with the war between Napster and the music recording industry, but this time it involves free sites like Olga.net, GuitarTabs.com and MyGuitarTabs.com and even discussion boards on the Google Groups service like alt.guitar.tab and rec.music.makers.guitar.tablature, where amateur musicians trade “tabs” — music notation especially for guitar — for songs they have figured out or have copied from music books.

On the other side are music publishers like Sony/ATV, which holds the rights to the songs of John Mayer, and EMI, which publishes Christina Aguilera’s music.

Speaking as a guitarist, Olga.net and services like it have helped inspire me to learn new songs when the urge arises and inspiration hits. Countless songs. I’ve forgotten far more then I can play (that’s not saying much with my little memory or lack of talent).

Speaking as a social media groupie, Olga.net and services like it, represent the ultimate in what online community can aspire too. Olga.net was started way back in 1992. 1992! You want to see the Long Tail of the Web at work? Well dive in you would find tabs posted on the most non-mainstream of artists you could think of. Why do folks contribute so much of their time and effort transcribing these songs so that others may learn them?

Love. The free exchange of knowledge – driven by love of subject matter and the desire to share. As purest an expression of that human need as any else online.

And the bastards are moving to take it down for a little additional profit.

Let me join with Kent Newsome (who posted a great description of what guitar tablature is) and Mathew Ingram in protesting this latest industry blunder.

President Bush: Iraq had ‘nothing’ to do with 9/11

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Watch this video. Bush really lets it slip.

We took resources away from the Afghanistan effort, an effort that every American across the country supported, that would have resulted in Osama’s head on a stick, to pursue a theory in transforming the Middle East. A theory!

The evil bastards that attacked us on 9/11 go on, taunting, threatening, while our leadership used the resources of this country to pursue an adventure in nation building. To the tune of thousands dead, and our enemies still roaming this good Earth.

As a friend told me, “We found a potential child molesting murderer Thailand. If we could do that, finding Osama should be as easy as finding mouse ears in Disneyland.”

Well, yeah. You would think so right?

The War on Terror has now gone on longer then WWII.

Here we are. We look weaker, shakier, and more threatening, in the eyes of the world. A world that, many forget, stood with us after 9/11 (re-watch those photos).

I’m a natural optimist and believe that people can do anything they set their minds to. It’s part of my make up. But the world grows crazier by the day. No voices calling for peace. No leaders with a vision to get us there.

More at Think Progress.

Update: Removed my disclaimer. I think most on the Left agree with this opinion, and that more than a few folks on the Right are waking up. Take a look at Memeorandum.

Sorry about the rant.