Search results matching tag 'wired'

Chris Anderson and newspapers, he doesn't care anymore

255762 — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:42:00 GMT

Chris Anderson, the Wired editor-in-chief and author of 'Free', has had it with newspapers. No seriously, he's through. He doesn't care. And journalism? And Media? Kids those words are so passe.

Anderson, who struck it big with his book 'The Long Tail' and wants everything to be 'Free', has given a long interview to the German weekly Spiegel where he makes a string of provocative statements as he talks about the internet's challenge to the traditional press.

Spiegel kicked off by asking Anderson about the future of journalism. The interview could have stopped right there. Anderson was already annoyed and made this clear. He doesn't use the word "journalism" and the word "media" is also a no no.

Anderson: This is going to be a very annoying interview. I don't use the word journalism.

Spiegel: "Okay, how about newspapers? They are in deep trouble both in the United States and worldwide."

Anderson: "Sorry, I don't use the word media. I don't use the word news. I don't think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like a 'horseless carriage'."

It must be tough for Anderson who is (okay among other things) a "magazine editor". Sadly, Spiegel did not ask him about this, what it did ask him was what other words would he use instead of media and journalism.

And I have to tell you at this point things start to get really difficult. Apparently there are no words. That's right, like not at all.

"There are no other words. We're in one of those strange eras where the words of the last century don't have meaning. What does news mean to you, when the vast majority of news is created by amateurs? Is news coming from a newspaper, or a news group or a friend? I just cannot come up with a definition for those words. Here at Wired, we stopped using them," Anderson told Spiegel.

Is it just me or is Anderson, you know, like full of himself? I wish to add here that it isn't only me as others have also noted this "fullness".

You kind of want to jump in and shout words like: content, editorial, commentary and analysis and ask: "Don't any of these words have any meaning? Are they all redundant?".

At this stage in the interview, the German "journalist" turns to the subject of "newspapers". I'm guessing here that as "news" has no meaning then it's likewise for newspapers. I'm kind of right here as Anderson really does not care about newspapers.

Spiegel: "So did you read a newspaper this morning?"

Anderson: "No."

Spiegel: "Your local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, is fighting for survival. If it was to disappear tomorrow..."

Anderson: "... I wouldn't notice. I don't even know what I'd be missing...newspapers are not important. It may be that their physical, printed form no longer works. "

Speigel: "So how do you stay informed?"

Anderson: "It comes to me in many ways: via Twitter, it shows up in my inbox, it shows up in my RSS feed, through conversations. I don't go out looking for it."

Speigel: "You just don't care."

Anderson: "No, I do care. You know, I pick my sources, and I trust my sources."

It strikes me that for a "journalist" (in part at least) who works in print to dismiss newspapers so out of hand as almost akin to biting the hand that feeds you. That could just be me.

Wired like every other print product has seen its advertising revenues plummet. The New York Times reported earlier this year that Wired has lost 50% of its ad pages so far this year, ranking it among the worst off of the more than 150 monthly magazines measured by Media Industry Newsletter.

How many people would miss Wired if it closed? Would Chris Anderson? Does he still want us to go out and buy it even though he gives the indication that he wouldn't got out and buy a printed publication himself (he'd have a point as he would have to pay for that "media", as it wouldn't, you know, be free).

He goes on in the interview to talk extensively about where he gets his news from. He talks RSS and Twitter. He loves these technologies (as do we all) and how he and others are still trying to figure out how we can all make money out of the web to fund our future.

All this comes after critics recently took a swipe at his new book, 'Free: The Future of a Radical Price', with the FT saying that the problem with Anderson is that he veers between sweeping statements and balancing paragraphs in a manner that leaves the reader unsure of what he is actually saying.

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Critics take a swipe at Chris Anderson's new book

255762 — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:35:00 GMT

Chris Anderson is not having a good week. It's open season on the Wired editor-in-chief who earlier this week suffered an assault by Malcom Gladwell in the New Yorker. Today it is the turn of the FT and its message is clear: "Free does not live up to its billing".

Gladwell kicked off an East Coast versus West Coast face-off with his New Yorker piece earlier this week, but you know without the hollow points, in a damning review of Chris Anderson's new book 'Free: The Future of a Radical Price' his follow up to his best seller 'The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling More of Less'.

First up, the New Yorker writer dismissed Anderson as a technological utopian who had got it wrong.

"It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for 'non-monetary rewards'. Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson’s reference to people who 'prefer to buy their music online' carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference. And then there is his insistence that the relentless downward pressure on prices represents an iron law of the digital economy.

"Why is it a law? Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. 'Information wants to be free,' Anderson tells us, 'in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.' But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?"

Today John Gapper in the FT has a crack at Anderson and his argument that "there really is a free lunch. Sometimes you get more than you pay for" although he says early on it is unfair to dismiss Anderson as a "digital utopian who is in intellectual and financial hock to Silicon Valley companies".

He argues 'Free' is more than propaganda for the West Coast software firms and venture capitalists, who have made their money and hope to make more out of being free although to be fair some have made it by charging you $2000 for a shiny laptop with a picture of a piece of fruit on it.

Gapper says the book is largely insightful. He describes it as "steady and scrupulous analysis of the past and present of free products and services" all at a time when newspapers, who are after all part of this "free revolution", are going out of business faster than you can say "free lunch" as the reporters whose jobs are going (thousands this week alone in the US with Gannett and in the UK with Trinity Mirror) could sure use it.

To borrow from Shakespeare "the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves". The same appears to be true of Anderson. It is not in his writing, which is as engaging as ever, but in the very nature of his sweeping arguments.

Gapper says the problem is that Anderson veers between sweeping statements and balancing paragraphs in a manner that leaves the reader unsure of what he is actually saying.

"It is an intellectual version of a ride in a New York taxi whose driver alternately pumps the accelerator and stamps on the brakes.

"Early on, we learn: The new form of Free is not a gimmick, a trick to shift money from one pocket to another [like razors and blades]. Instead, it's driven by an extraordinary new ability to lower the costs of goods and services close to zero. While the last century's Free was a powerful marketing method, this century's Free is an entirely new economic model'.

"That is a big claim and it never really gets substantiated, at least not at the scale of Mr Anderson's rhetoric. Actually, quite a bit of what he claims to be new appears really to be the virtual equivalent of 'buy one, get one free' or the cheap subscriptions long offered by US magazines."

Gapper goes onto argue that Anderson's vision has two flaws: first, as Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, has pointed out, network effects unleashed by digital technology tend not to spawn free competition among equals but a "winner takes all" effect in which a single company emerges with all the spoils. In the software era, that company was Microsoft; in the internet era, it is Google.

"The second flaw is that, even if the cost of digital distribution is lower than that of physical distribution, the marginal cost of production is not cut to zero. Companies have many costs, from marketing to employing people to make things. Offering things free on the internet is loss-leading just as surely as handing Jell-O recipe books to American housewives was in 1904."

Whatever happens we are all going to be reading this and I for one am looking forward to hear Anderson answer some of these critics tonight "Free–The Future of a Radical Price" 2 July Royal College of Physicians".

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Social media and the Iranian election

255762 — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:07:00 GMT

On Wired.com, Andrew Exum is wondering all about Iran and the explosive use of social media to organise, agitate and protest in Iran. He's wondering how real it all is? And if it is the technological enabled few rather than the digitally deprived masses.

He wrote: "Are we simply finding common cause with a technologically-assisted minority and confusing it for a popular movement? One observer of the Moldova protests noticed the way in which we Westerners get fascinated by 'Twitter revolutions' because, hey! We use Twitter too!"

The Wired piece quotes others who are not convinced, but from the pictures it looks bigger than the technological few. The few might have Twitter accounts, but they are it seems being used to organise and bring others together in massive protests.

There is so much going on and a lot of summaries are already around, but here's some of the multitude of links and posts that are coming out of the protests.

#IranElection is the top search term on Twitter which is being used by Iranians to co-ordinate protests and post photos and messages in the wake of the presidential election on Friday.

The opposition reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi is using updates via Twitter and is using it to rally his supporters. One message on Mousavi1388 asks: "Confirmed by BBC Persian, please tell everyone to join them: Mousavi, Karoubi & Khatami will be at the protest. #IranElection"

When it appeared that Twitter was about to shut down for 90 minutes downtime tonight for maintenance, Twitter decided to reschedule the maintenance so the protests could go on.

Mousavi's Twitter feed also made a direct appeal to Twitter: "@twitter Twitter is currently our ONLY way to communicate overnight news in Iran, PLEASE do not take it down. #IranElection"

Yesterday @Mousavi1388 had 7,000 followers on that particular Twitter feed and today it has nearer 10,000. Another Twitter feed @StopAhmadi has more than 7,000 followers. A third feed, @Persiankiwi, has more than 18,000 followers.

The Twitter feed is being used as an unofficial media channel and one that is becoming indispensible for journalists covering the post election story. A tweet this morning, says: "URGNT@ ALL jornlsts, Tday 15:30 Prss Conf. in Tehran, Sadr MotrWay, Kave Shomali Blvd, Roshanayi St, Bahar Shomali St. Num. 9 #IranElection".

Mousavi's Facebook page has more than 53,000 supporters and many Facebook members have posted video while others are trying to persuade fellow Facebook users to change their personal icons to the colour green to show support for the Iranian opposition.

Users on Twitter are also trying to persuade fellow tweeters to change their location to Tehran to make it harder for agents of the interior ministry to track down protesting Iranians.

Blogs are also playing a major role. Iran has always had a large community of bloggers, not least because the number of young people in the country, and many are writing about the protests and like photoblog Tehranlive.org are posting photo updates hourly.

Others are posting images to Flickr and Google's Picasa and making the albums freely available on the web with hundreds of videos being uploaded to YouTube.

A real time feed of images being posted from Iran can be found on PicFog and Twitter users are using the likes of Twitpic to upload their images.

The increasing array of Twitter apps are all playing their role in the protests. Twitter search engine Twazzup is tracking all things Iran-related on Twitter.

Saeed Valadbaygi's 'Revolutionary Road' is one that provides a good source for pulling various coverage of the protests together.

As well as Iranian bloggers international news organisations, including the BBC, which with its Persian service has become a focus for Iranians and widely praised although it was being jammed intermittently over the weekend, and blogs like the Huffington Post, The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan's blog and the New York Times' The Lede blog are covering the aftermath of the elections in detail.

Others such as the National Iranian American Council is live blogging events blog aggregation site Global Voices has a special section and is translating reports from the Iranian blogosphere.

CNN has not had a good protest. It has come in for some heavy criticism for failing to focus on Iran in depth and thousands used the label CNNfail on Twitter to vent their frustrations. Since then CNN has since ramped up its coverage, but it could be too little too late.

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Loose Talk 7 April

2458936 — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 10:47:00 GMT

Men's magazines dedicated to either metrosexual matters or scantily clad women are closing for good or retiring from print. Time for a grown-up, sophisticated and challenging publication dedicated to this other, but not exclusively, manly interest: digital technology?
That's what Condé Nast thought as it launched Wired magazine at Skylon, in London's Southbank Centre. GQ editor Dylan Jones, DDB chairman Stephen Woodford and Jamie Jouning, publisher of Wired were among the guests. Others included Aegis Media's Nigel Sharrocks, OMD' s Jonathan Allan, Neil Brown and Tim Forrest, M2M's Nick Bailey and Nicola Anderton, and Zenith's David Grainger, Rupert Dadak and Tim Lamble.

Meanwhile, at Level 31 @ Paramount, thelondonpaper launched its two-day live music event called thelondonpaper Headliners, with a live set by FrankMusik and a DJ performance from Lily Allen's ex, Seb Chew.
Here, guests included MediaCom's Richard Isaac and Vizeum's Tony Giordani, while thelondonpaper was represented by managing director Ian Clark and Caroline Orange from News International Commercial.

Was Wired's Chris Anderson a smack dealer in a former life?

2182355 — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:16:00 GMT

Wired magazine's US editor-in-chief has some forthright, and well-judged, views on life and, more specifically, the changing business landscape in the digital age.

His best-selling book, The Long Tail - which espoused the value to be tapped in the multitude of niches within the market - is soon to be followed by his next foray (Free - an exploration of the ‘radical price point of zero').

Speaking on Friday, at a Conde Nast-organised Wired seminar, Anderson, interviewed by UK Wired editor David Rowan, talked, among other things, about what "free" means for businesses - and in the crudest terms, it seemed to boil down to getting people hooked on a free, possibly inferior version of your product, then charging them for the good stuff. Sound familiar? It's a model much loved by drug dealers on many of our less-salubrious estates.

Explaining in more detail, "free", in this instance, can't mean you give everything away for free. While the nature of the internet is driving the price point to nothing - falling storage, server and bandwidth charges - a purely ad-funded model is still not a good idea in the current market. Companies, said Anderson, are shifting their model to direct payment - they want to be cashflow positive now

What he suggested is that businesses need multiple versions of their products, in order to give away free to the majority, but get about 5-10% of people to pay for the same content or a premium version of it.

In Wired terms, Anderson explained, this means giving the content away online for free, but getting people to buy the magazine. Sounds easy enough, although this week's ABCs will show the last bit is a little trickier in reality.

The "freemium" model - some free content with premium services paid for - is already operated by a few major publishers, The FT being the obvious UK example, and is how Anderson sees the future of content provision being funded. The Wired model, free online content but a paid-for print version, is pretty much what every remaining publisher adheres to. But at the moment, for many, this latter iteration of the "free" model is not working.

Removing the ‘walled garden' and offering total open access, relying solely on ads for revenue has been the rallying cry of the majority of traditional publishers as they charge headlong into the digital age.

The fact they are all are finding it tough to replace the lost print advertising and circulation revenues by generating cash from even huge online audiences makes either of Anderson's suggestions (free online and pay for print, or some free online and some paid for) a little hard to square for everyone in media who's currently struggling.

"Getting someone to pay for something they love is a nice problem to have," said Anderson on Friday. Unfortunately, driving prices higher at any time, let alone in a recession, and let alone from free to paid for, is not an easy task.

Anderson has a well-deserved reputation as a deep, solid thinker and it would be unfair, and a mistake, to prejudge his Free book on the basis of a half hour interview, in which it wasn't even the main topic.

But, it does feel as though free is just how it is. There is no going back for publishers. There is no chance that people will start to pay for something they've enjoyed for free for so long. And there's not much, if anything, in terms of information, that an average consumer is now, or will be in future, willing to pay for.

Which only begs the question, if the ad-funded model doesn't start working, and people aren't prepared to pay for information, how are media businesses ever going to fill the revenue void?

PR is dead

917990 — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:22:00 GMT

And so are blogs according to a journalist from US Wired last week - a story that somehow made it into the Telegraph, Times, Sunday Times, Radio 4, Brand Republic in the UK - and those are just the one’s I happened across. What’s interesting about this isn’t the idea 'blogging is dead’ – which is obviously a preposterous notion, but the amount of coverage making such a controversial claim can get you.

With the imminent launch of a UK version of Wired – I detect some non- coincidental PR at work here. Whoever you are, congratulations, you truly hit a media nerve point. I think for my next press release, whatever it is, I shall claim it is dead.

Why blogging is far from dead

255762 — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You had better stop reading this as blogging is dead. Seriously, I just read it. Some wag at Wired says there is too much social media, and blogging is, like, so 2004. What rubbish.

According to Paul Boutin, who writes for Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag, writing a blog today isn't the bright idea it was four years ago as the blogosphere, "once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge".

Tsunami of paid-for bilge? It was worth reading the piece for that alone. I laughed out loud, as this rant was clearly marked "paid bilge" as someone hit the publish button.

He goes on to say that "cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths" and it is almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers.

His line is why bother? – you are better off expressing yourself on Facebook, Flickr or Twitter.

His argument seems to be those folksy blogs where people wrote about their humdrum day to day lives or, ahem, subjects such as politics or dating have been replaced by impersonal professional sites.

You mean like Valleyway? The site he writes for that is part of Nick Denton's media blog empire Gawker. Do you think he is talking at all about himself when he writes about "cut-rate journalists"? I'm emailing him right now. I'm just going to say this: does the phrase "pot kettle, kettle black" mean nothing to you? Try it out and take it for a spin. I think you might like it.

Swipes aside, on one level he has a point. The world is full of professional blogs in 2008 and marketers have entered the fray. The medium has grown and matured. New players and types of blog have entered the market. In places it has got professional, there are powerful blogs out there like the Huffington Post, and that is to be applauded for what it has brought us.

Newspapers like the Guardian have also thrived with sites like Comment is Free. All good news I say. Who wants to see the blogging wither and die? Not me for one. I enjoy this too much.

A lot of those early bloggers got bored and moved on as the novelty of writing an online came and went. My first blog ran for a few years and virtually all of the links that I had on my blogroll have died, but not all.

Yes social media, micro blogging and multi media sites are all the rage, but there is a place for all here. I use Facebook, Twitter and have flirted with a bunch of other social media sites but not, errr, committed. Blogging offered, and still does, a space to put down a sentence and a link or 500 words. Whatever caught your fancy that day. He complains in the piece that text-based sites aren't where the buzz is anymore, which is true but the buzz moves on and what it leaves behind is the substance.

For B2B sites like Brand Republic, blogging is very important. We've built up, and continue to do so, a network of bloggers with a variety of things to say. Some might post a picture, a piece of video or like me they might type for a good while before stopping.

Blogging is alive and kicking. Okay, I need to let me fellow Twitters know what I've been doing in the long form.

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