Egnaro TV

For the past few months I've been subscribed to the Toronto Police Services news release email lists for several Toronto divisions. I have a few unscientific observations to make after reading through them on a weekly basis.

It's alarming the number of sexual assaults that occur. I'm encouraged that things have changed since Jane Doe's battle with the police force and that theynow put out these news releases within hours of the assaults happening instead of keeping it a secret so as not to scare off the assailant. Most assuring of all though is it seems like 99% of these news releases are followed up within a wrek or two to say the suspect has been apprehended.

Aside from sexual assaults, the releases generally cover break and enters as well as other physical assaults. Kind of an interesting way to keep an eye on what's going on around your neighbourhood. I actually wish these were in an RSS feed with some custom fields such as type of crime, some form of geo data etc. I think these would be even more useful in a database and on a map somewhere. TPS should even be twittering every time they put one of these out.

This is the title of an interview on Salon.com with Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired. First off, it's hard for me to take anything Anderson says too seriously given his magazine was once the tome of the digital generation and is now mostly a pile of ads targeted at upper class business guys and stories trying to sell them on stuff and the latest business trends. To be fair, wired.com is still one of the best sites out there with a load of diverse content. Back to the point of this post…

I'm pretty sure Anderson has no idea what he's talking about after reading this interview. He opens the interview saying "I don't use the word 'media'" and then as @Heather_R points out, uses it 6 times in the interview. When asked if he miss the existance of major newspapers Anderson says no because he doesn't go to them to get his news, he goes to Twitter, preferring to just look at content filtered by those he follows. Where does that content his fellow tweeters post come from though? From major news outlets mostly. And this is the thing that irks me most about people declaring that we don't need major news organizations and trained journalists anymore.

While the average blogger/tweeter/photographer does a great job at getting news tidbits out to the world in near real-time rarely do they do the sort of follow-up investigation into the stories that a journalist would. Nor do they have the experience or historical knowledge of related stories to help put their words into context. When's the last time your neighbour hopped on a flight to Iraq to blog about the war and post some pictures to Flickr – and Joe the Plumber doesn't count? True, some of the best reports are those coming from the citizens in a region, like the recent turmoil in Iran but there is still a place and a need for our reporters to cover these stories too. An Iranian blogger can't help us understand what role the Canadian government could play in a situation.

Once Anderson is done delcaring the irrelevance of current forms of news reporting – while still hinting that he actually reads this stuff but is really just too lazy to source it himself – he moves on to "free", also the title of his new book. There's a tie here to my post yesterday. Anderson is all too keen to tell you about how great it is that he's giving away a digital version of his book for free but then acknowledges that he has to charge for the hardcover and audio cassette versions. What he doesn't acknowledge is that the digital version costs money too. Hosting digital files and transmitting them through the tubes isn't free, therefore his book sales are in some way subsidizing the free version. I'm also sure Anderson doesn't live in an abandoned shack in the woods and has bills to pay. Being the editor at Wired probably affords him some play room to do work and not get paid for it but writing a book is no quick task and I'm sure he, like anyone else, wants to be compensated for his time. 

By the time I was done reading this interview I realized that Chris Anderson really has very little to contribute. His support of 'free' everything is really just a description of the current wild state of the web while he clearly acknowledges we need new business models but offers nothing in the way of suggestions at what those might be. Anderson declares that "free is the force of gravity", a force we can't fight, that once people get some thing free they will always want it free. Yet this is clearly not true. At the start of the decade millions of people were downloading pirated music all around the world and P2P was the way of the future. What we've seen since then is the emergance of iTunes, eMusic, Pandora, Last.fm and a host of other great sources for music online. Filling the demand for music, these services are seeing huge success and shock of all shocks, people are paying for music again! (Read more on this trend over at Mark Evans' blog)

It sure seems easy to declare that "free" is the future and that "media" and "journalism" are dying when you work for one of the largest ad supported magazines and websites in the world. The only thing that Anderson gets right is that the traditional web banner is broken. It doesn't deliver enough value. We need to figure this out so we can start seeing the kind of spending on the web that we use to see in print.

Is it just me or is it completely ironic that BlogTO and Torontoist spend a lot of time going on about the web being the future of news but yet they are both working with printed papers to distribute their content. I'd also guess these are some of the more lucrative arrangements both blogs have made compared to rates paid for web ads. BlogTO announced today they will be providing a page of content to the new T.O.night afternoon paper. Both blogs have good numbers in terms of web traffic and loyal followings, but BlogTO's recent deal plus Torontoist's ongoing relationship with the Globe tell me something isn't quite right here yet.

Web prophets have been singing about the death of newspapers for months now as many prominent print rags have ceased physical production and exist in the virtual only. I call bullshit on all of this. Newspapers aren't going away and most certainly journalism isn't going anywhere. The challenge that news media is facing is one of re-modelling business and advertising structures. No doubt there will be casualties along the way, but they will survive. The problem is really no different than the exploration and discovery period the music industry is in right now. Artists are suddenly finding a new voice, free of the contraints of major labels. I'd hazard a guess that despite the massive decline in CD sales that many more bands are making a living off their music now than ever before.

For too long papers have closed the shutters and hoped the storm would pass, seemingly ignorant of the fact that they actually already have assets of incredible value in their possession – knowledge, networks of relationships, history, brand recognition and more. What needs to be done is a discovery of new ways to make money from these assets. 

Some will be successful with microtransactions, most will not. Advertising will still be the best bet. Others will say the hold-up is in the ad industries unwillingness to budge from their standards. I'd argue that newspapers should be showing them the way. Giving them new ad opportunities, leveraging ad dollars to explore new mediums and helping them create new ways to reach their audience that are both more meaningful and less intrusive to the end user.

Will we still have print editions 10 years from now? I'm guessing no. Between environmental concerns, the cost of printing and new technology I don't think there will be much need for print. Think about the dramatic changes to the way we obtain and enjoy music over the past 10 years. The Amazon Kindle is merely the beginning of e-books. Tech publisher O'Reilly has recently started selling individual books as iPhone applications. Other tech companies are joining in on the e-book market as well. Rumours of an Apple tablet continue to swhirl around the tubes. I think we are going to see the equivalent of an iPod for text over the few years – a fantastically beautiful cross between the iPhone, Kindle and netbooks everyone's been scooping up over the last 12 months. This universally loved and coveted device will comfortably fill the gap between the small screen of a smartphone and large size of work ready laptop. There will be numerous other devices that fall into this market as well and portable digital text reading will finally be ubiquitous.

The point is that newspapers, like music, aren't going away, they are just going to shift from one delivery method to multiple streams, all fed from the web. This is inevitable. The tricky part is bringing the ad dollars along for the ride.