Food in My Neighborhood

For the UW Masters in Digital Media Multimedia Storytelling class

Must short media always be free?

Remember the flashing 12:00’s on VCR’s? Many people who bought video tape recorders could never figure out how to program them. Convenience is a huge factor in media consumption. Is radio the best way to consume audio material? Probably not but it’s ubiquitous and so easy to use you don’t even have to turn it on to wake up in the morning.

Wasik points out that paying is a speed bump in media consumption. It needn’t be an inconvenience. Songs are short media content. Apple’s I-tunes has effectively figured out how to charge for them by providing convenience. Songs are easy to find. There are many opportunities to find similar things. Purchasing is a breeze. You could probably find the song for free elsewhere but it would take more time, it might be a bad recording, there would malware embedded in it. We pay for the convenience of I-tunes.

Likewise there will be a market for short content when an aggregator provides an easy way to find and pay for it and an attractive interface that keeps the browser around. The speed bump of payment can be overcome by an effective micro-payment system that could charge a penny or less for short content.  Even modest payments to content producers will attract the best ones to such a site.

The aggregator’s challenge would be to find a more effective way than Google to put useful content before the viewer. There are at least two other options. Employ social networking to steer people to short content their trusted friends like or use the Pandora model. Pandora’s musicologists break down the elements of each song you like by dozens of factors (beat, vocal quality, tone, instrumentation) to provide an educated guess about what other songs you might like.

Is charging for Hulu is a video apocalypse or a breath of fresh air?

Neither. Charging for Hulu will cut back on the number of viewers. Free trumps a charge every time. Viewers will seek out the other free video content available legally or illegally.

For those TV networks using Hulu as a distribution channel this flight will be bad. They need to recoup their costs of production. With falling viewership on regular TV and weak financial support from web distribution they’ll trim back expenses, i.e. more experiments like Leno at 10 pm. They’ll have to reach a point where revenue = production costs + profit.

Media professionals like to think that their superior artistic skills and technical prowess are important to audience. We’re finding out if that’s true. Does the audience really care enough about the current standards of broadcast television production to pay for it? Or will low production cost, good enough TV fill the gap? Or will television professionals have to suck it up and work much less?

Stay tuned.

 

 

Where do pictures come in? COM597B WK 6

I’ve been having a hard time with Ryan’s dismissal of the image as a ‘weak and subordinated’ mode of story telling.

Can we stop calling corporate flack shops ‘newsrooms’?

Newsrooms research and present information to help create a more informed public. Marketing ‘newsrooms’ create information designed to sell stuff. I’ve got nothing against selling stuff. I like buying stuff. But slapping the name ‘newsroom’ on a corporate public relations office is an Orwellian mockery of journalism.  Whew! Got that off my chest. On to the assignment.

I began considering the program 18 months ago out of the concern that the disruption in broadcast media brought about by the Internet would soon engulf public radio. I felt that high-speed Internet access in automobiles would allow listeners to tune into their favorite public radio programs and other audio offerings without listening to public radio stations. This could reduce the audience for stations, hampering on-air and corporate fundraising.

I felt that stations needed to have a strong presence online with easy access to their vast audio archives and use of social media to extend the dialogue about the events, news, politics and culture that we undertake on the air. The challenges are 1 how to maintain public radio station’s strongest asset, the trust of the audience, in a new form of media, 2 how to master the new media.

A year and a half later my goals remain the same but with slightly less urgency.  High speed Internet in cars is still a concept rather than a reality. The loyalty and support of public radio station listeners continues to increase. Radio remains a ubiquitous medium. It wakes people in the morning and remains a companion in cars, the kitchen, while jogging and gardening. The simplicity and convenience of radio combined with the unique worldview offered by public broadcasters remains powerful to the audience.

COM597B Review of NY Times Video

I go to The New York Times homepage daily but I have watched very few videos. In the course of doing this assignment I found a rich library.

Reflection on Chris Anderson’s ‘Free’

I had a chance to interview Chris Anderson about his cover ‘Free’ in Wired Magazine, which later became the book. The interview was during the KUOW pledge drive so I said I wanted to talk about public radio a model for monetizing free. He demurred.

“You don’t want me to talk about public radio”, he said. “I’m your worst nightmare”. So I asked why.

“I listen to public radio programs like This American Life as podcasts. I almost never listen to my local public radio station, KQED. When I contribute money I send it directly to the shows I listen to.”

The story illustrates both the promise and pitfalls of ‘free’ as a business model.

COM597B Class project proposal

Tell me a story about Seattle – about a neighborhood, subculture, politics (the hotly contested mayor’s race), history (it’s the 10th anniversary of the WTO demonstrations), art, music, sports, people, architecture. Focus on a facet that you feel makes Seattle unique, funny, beautiful, lame,worldly or provincial.

Explore the landscape, transportation, the water (too soon?).  Explore how the outside world views Seattle, a myth about Seattle, truths about Seattle, famous local figures. If you just arrived, what strikes you? If you’ve been here for a long time, tell a story about something you learned. Make a big point about Seattle (there’s a Seattle freeze) or a personal reflection about how the city seems to you.

This idea would work because we all spend at least some time in Seattle. It’s broad enough to encompass many kinds of stories.  It would be fun to see what would emerge from such a varied group of individuals.

What’s twitter? 69 percent of adults don’t know.

Alan Ostrow parses a new Harris survey which shows most adults don’t know enough about twitter to have an opinion about it.

Colleges offer I-Phone App Courses

USA Today reports that Stanford is among the schools.

An iPhone Developer University Program launched last fall… allows qualifying colleges and universities to produce iPhone apps at no cost, spurring several institutions to offer a course in the technology.