Rebooting The News

How big is a nugget of news? Dave has an answer. It’s about 185 characters. But to be safe you’d need about 250.

Jay: what is the status of the loosely coupled 140-character message network? Dave: kind of stalled, waiting for other players, especially the makers of Twitter client apps. “If they want to offer their users independence from Twitter…” then it will happen.

Jay: The arc of an idea like that is long, and broken. It stops and starts and disappears and returns.

Here’s another case of audience atomization overcome. For the next few months, Jake Tapper is hosting ABC’s This Week on Sunday morning. He began live tweeting the show this week, and he was also very active in soliciting ideas and suggestions for the program. You can see some of it at this feed. “Bit by bit the interactive system is becoming overlaid on the old one-to-many system.”

Dave: A good example is Robert Gibbs tweeting immediately after Vice President Joe Biden was heard whispering to Obama, “this is a big f*cking deal” about the health care bill getting signed. Gibbs: “And yes Mr. Vice President, you’re right.”

Meanwhile, CBS’s Face the Nation was forced to adopt my simple fix for the Sunday shows by the distortions and inventions of Republican Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann.

A question Jay posed went viral on Twitter: The Wall Street Journal will charge $17.99 a month for the Journal on the iPad. That’s $215 a year. For the print edition delivered to your home or office plus online access to wsj.com, the yearly rate is $140. Does anyone understand this pricing?

Dave: “It’s what we call in the tech industry the Steve Jobs reality distortion field.” Doc Searls explained in 1997. Sure people will pay for convenience, but “what they pay a lot for is lust.” And the iPad is right now an object of lust.

Dave: what the newspaper firms should do is get Apple to bundle their content in for free with the iPad. “The one that gets installed first is going to have a huge advantage over the ones that come second or third. A newspaper is an advertising platform, and the iPad probably will be a hot reading platform, and the apps (ads) will seek out the hot newspaper the same way guys like me bet on PC-DOS and ignored CP/M and UCSD. So the best price for a newspaper on the iPad is $0. (Sorry. I know this isn’t what the news guys want to hear.)”

Jay: Across the ocean, the Times of London announced recently that their paywall will go up in June. I had a visitor from the Times of London in my office last week. Based on my conversation with her, the staff is not ready for what this will shift to a pay site means. They don’t realize that they will have to produce way more value.

Dave: It kind of reminds me of when I started DaveNet in 1994-95. Everyone thought I would turn it into a paid subscriber product. But my goal was to have influence, so why would I do that?

Jay: Lots of people don’t understand the logic of the gift economy.

Dave: Is that what I’m doing? I don’t see it as the gift economy.

Dave: “Why am I interested in news?…. So that I can base my view of the world on something that’s accurate.”

Jay: “Part of the reason I love news is I was raised in a chaotic household where you could never establish ‘what happened’… It is very important to me that there is some force in the world that can say, No, this is what happened.”

Dave: “I couldn’t agree more.”

Here’s the show; please listen and, if you feel like it, comment.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Mar29.mp3

How big is a nugget of news? Dave has an answer.

Jay: The Wall Street Journal will charge $17.99 a month for the Journal on the iPad. That’s $215 a year. For the print edition delivered to your home or office plus online access to wsj.com, the yearly rate is $140. Does anyone understand this pricing? Dave says it’s a case of the Steve Jobs reality distortion field. It’s about his art, as Doc Searls wrote in 1997.

I met with someone from the London Times last week. They announced recently that their paywall will go up in June. Based on my conversation with her, the staff is not ready for what this will mean.

PressThink has done well with How the Backchannel Has Changed the Game for Conference Panelists. Its another way of explaining “audience atomization overcome.”

Somewhat related: Jake Tapper is hosting ABC’s This Week on Sunday morning. And he began live tweeting the show this week, and he was also very active in soliciting ideas and suggestions for the program. You can see some of it at this feed.

Face the Nation is forced to adopt my simple fix for the Sunday shows by the distortions and inventions of Republican Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann.

Jay was sick today so I scrambled and got the great Jonathan Glick to fill his chair in the studio.

Glick started his career at iVillage then became the chief technical guy at the NY Times under Martin Nisenholtz. We worked together then but didn’t know each other. After several stops he’s now landed as CEO of a startup called TLists. (If Scoble doesn’t already know about them, he will soon!)

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Mar22.mp3

In today’s podcast we talked about Internet platforms and the struggles small vendors to co-exist and vendors to be fair. TLists exists in Twitter’s ecosystem. It was a hot discussion and left many questions unanswered. Hope to have Jon on the show again (and this is a reminder that we should try to rotate through the founders of some of NY’s new crop of tech CEOs, they’re all interesting people).

And to Jay –> Hope you feel better sooon! (Everyone seems to get sick after SXSW.)

Another “keeper” — this week Jay is on the phone from SXSW and I’m in the studio at NYU.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Mar15.mp3

Topics include: Jake Tapper, problems with WordPress, Thursday evening meetup, Dave pre-orders an iPad, Jessica Roy, general mayhem.

The Local: East Village was announced since the last time we did the show. NYU and the New York Times are collaborating on the site. Students in the Studio 20 program are the incubation team.

Jay: “It brings into the equation all the problems of being part of the community you are reporting on… We’re not trying to create here a replicable site that you could pick up and plop down somewhere.”

Turns out Dave used to hang out in the East Village, including the Fillmore East: “The community is the persistent part; the students come and go.” The historical and cultural significance of the East Village is what makes this an especially interesting project. “Much like parts of California today are cultural leaders, the East Village was at one time at the center of American culture.” And it will be again.

Dave: first question I got about this announcement was… what about the New York Times paywall? Will the new site be behind the wall?

Jay: “I’ve made my feelings known and we at NYU have made our feelings known to the New York Times– that we believe this site definitely deserves to be outside the paywall.” There are compelling reasons why we say that; but the Times isn’t ready to decide the matter yet.

Dave: The idea of charging for access to stuff the community is doing for free is a non-starter.

Jay: Well, we’re hoping to pay for at least a portion of the material we draw from the community.

Dave: What’s the number one goal?

Jay: To become an essential news source for people in the East Village.

Dave: “I would think it might be an educational goal.”

Jay: That’s important but it follows from engagement with the community.

Dave: Internet access for different neighborhoods in New York would be an excellent investigation for The Local: East Village. Verizon won’t show you the map of where its super fast Fios service is available. The access I have in my building is phenomenal coming down, but not as good going up. That’s asymmetric service.

Jay: A feature of the rebooted system of news should be: “upload speeds are as fast as download speeds.”

Audience atomization overcome, Jays calls it: “For journalism what this means is that the horizontal sharing networks are as significant as the vertical synthesizing of information, and the future of journalism is in these hybrid forms.”

So let’s find out! “Where in the East Village can you actually get Fios and what’s actually available block by block.” It’s a distributed reporting project, and since audience atomization has been overcome, it’s now possible to pull it off. “The real power is when we can combine these horizontal sharing networks and aggregated data with reporters checking it out.”

Jay’s dream project in distributed reporting: what if we were able to take the 50 top selling pharmaceuticals in the world and fine out what they cost, what the benefits are said to be, and how they are marketed in every country in the world? In the age of mass media, impossible. But today: not impossible at all.

Dave: where the money is in news. With all of these projects we may be able to locate the elusive business model for journalism. “The principle of making money of the Internet is to find where the cash is flowing and facilitate that. Create a place that facilitates the flow of cash and that’s a place where you can put a business model.” Internet access may be one, but you need to assemble good information.

Jay: In news, it’s not only “where’s the money going to come from?” but also: how do we take advantage of lower costs?

Dave: It’s like Mark Andreessen says: burn the boats. When the quarterback gets the ball, he always drops back a few yards to buy himself some time to look around. In the news industry they’re not willing to do that. “We’ve got these phenomenal networks that make news work so much better than before, what a wonderful time to be in the news business.”

Dave: Real time search, which is here, isn’t as valuable as it once sounded.

Jay: Facebook is driving more traffic these days.

Dave: They’re getting a lot of ideas from the FriendFeed guys they acquired.

Here’s the show; we hope you enjoy it.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Mar08.mp3

A few items for today’s show:

The Local: East Village was announced since the last time we did the show.

Dave has an idea for where the money is in local news.

Dave’s items:

Real time search

What is Apple up to.

Why We’re Giving Away Our Reporting Recipe. The bosses at ProPublica explain their decision to release their reporting recipe: How You Can Investigate Your State’s Oversight of Its Nurses and Other Licensed Professionals.

The Police Department in NYC is moving in a progressive direction with its proposed rules about who gets press credentials.