Journalism By Game: Bringing The Community Into The Process

from the one-future-for-journalism? dept

Back in college, I took a lot of statistics classes -- and I did pretty well in them, but it wasn't until I was well into a pretty high level stats class that I finally started to understand statistics, and it had nothing to do with the class or the teacher. It had to do with the job I'd taken as a stats tutor for six different intro stats classes (and, eventually, that resulted in teaching a full class on stats to incoming freshmen). What I realized is that as useful as the book learning and problem sets and everything was, it wasn't until I had to actually explain something back to someone who really didn't understand it, that I finally started to really understand the more important aspects of statistics. I couldn't get away with "well, I understand this because it works." I had to so fully understand statistics that I could actually understand questions that came from way out in left field, and try to figure out how to fit them back into the framework that was being taught. It was a valuable lesson.

In talking about the future of journalism, one point I've made repeatedly, is that news organizations need to realize that their community is their best asset, and they need to cater to them more and involve them a lot more in the process. Today's news "consumer" isn't really a consumer, but a participant. I've talked about how they want to share the news, write the news and comment on the news, but what about actually experiencing the news in some manner?

Whether on purpose or not, it seems like that's what Wired just accomplished with its ambitious Vanish project. If you haven't paid attention to it, it started with an article last month in Wired, called Gone Forever: What Does It Take to Really Disappear?, written by reporter Evan Ratliff. The article itself was quite an enjoyable read, about people who have simply tried to disappear and start a new life (and the difficulty of actually vanishing from your old life). Despite the topic (and the fact that I love such stories), I probably would have skipped the article over. There's only so much time and so many things you can read in a daily basis -- and (as you might have guessed) I already read a lot.

But, Wired combined this with a contest. The reporter on the story, Evan Ratliff agreed to "vanish" himself for a month, and the contest was to see if anyone could find him. If someone found him and said the word "fluke" to him, Evan would respond with a codeword that would allow the "winner" to alert Wired's Nicholas Thompson and claim a $5,000 prize (including, I believe, Ratliff's own $3,000 for writing the article). That certainly made the story a lot more compelling. I have to admit that I didn't participate much in the "chase" which was tracked in a variety of places online from Facebook to Twitter to the Vanish blog on Wired, which dropped clues and tied together some of the findings.

On Tuesday, however, Ratliff was caught, down in New Orleans, by the operator of a pizza shop, who had been alerted to the whole thing just a day before by someone who had been very closely tracking Ratliff, and used some rather creative means to track him down -- including befriending some people who were alerted to Evan's whereabouts without even realizing it. You can read the full explanation from Jeff Reifman as to how he tracked down Ratliff, or Wired's shorter summary of the story. In the end, Ratliff left a lot of clues, but he did so purposely, to help illustrate typical mistakes made by those who do try to "vanish" for real.

However, what struck me, was just how involved the community got in this story. It reminded me of the revelation of learning statistics by teaching it -- and has me thinking more about "experiential" reporting on "reporting by game" to better involve a community in various projects. I am not suggesting that "this is the future of journalism." But I am saying it may be one potentially useful way that some stories could be told. For many people involved in this project, I'll bet they learned a hell of a lot more about this issue than they ever expected. And even those of use who were "casual observers" picked up a ton of interesting knowledge about how people try to vanish -- and (perhaps much more interesting) how others track them down. If I were looking to make journalism more interesting, I'd start looking at ways to more creatively involve a community, and Wired's Vanish experiment is one to keep in mind as an example.

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There May Be Hope For The Recording Industry, Yet

from the let's-wait-and-see... dept

As noted, I'm at the Leadership Music Digital Summit to give a keynote talk tomorrow. Today's keynote is from Rio Caraeff, the executive VP of the eLabs group of Universal Music Group. Listening to his talk, it's impressive to see that it appears someone within Universal Music Group actually seems to understand what's going on. That may seem a bit dismissive of Universal Music Group, but it's not my assessment, but what the CEO of Universal Music Group flat out said just a couple of years ago, in noting that he had absolutely no clue about digital music and didn't even know how to hire the right people.

Caraeff, however, seems focused on all the right things. He talked about how access to music is more important than possession. He talks about how it's the experience that has always made music valuable, noting "you can't steal experience." In fact, he points out that the concept of the album is dead, but that UMG (and others) need to build a true "living album" that goes beyond the music: adding a full experience that can update over time, that allows fans to access the music however they want, and that enables interaction with that music -- including fan participation and user-generated content associated with the music. And he wants it all built on open standards, to avoid a situation like the Blu-ray consortium where only a few companies have control of the system.

"How do we compete with piracy? It's creating a unique experience that can't be easily replicated through file sharing."

He then goes on to say that the business of "licensing music" is a dead end because it's just not scalable (whoo hoo!) noting that it's killing innovation. Even saying that they need to acknowledge that they need to enable letting a thousand innovators bloom.

He did admit that the team at UMG is still struggling to figure out the best way to make money in this new world -- but he recognizes this is where things are going:

"I'd rather have access to all my music, tv shows and movies anywhere on any device, rather than "own" 100 files. This is going to be a swift transition. It's taken us less than 10 years to go from plastic discs to digital files. It will take 5 years or less to go from digital files to cloud-based services, which will make the music even more valuable."

This is all good news. It's someone who clearly recognizes the shift that needs to be made by a major record label. But, the real question is how much influence he actually has at Universal Music Group. We've seen similar recognition among employees at other record labels, including Warner Music and EMI -- but the "top management" at both of those firms has continued to go in the opposite direction, focusing on stomping out innovation, rather than encouraging it.

Unfortunately, this may be a real issue. He did admit:

"Universal Music is a big company and not everyone there is on the same page, but I was put into this job to make these changes. Turning a big ship around is slow. It's not a lack of desire, but it's a question of when not if. A lot of what I do is talk and evangelize to others within UMG to try to raise the consciousness level about where our business is going, to bring us to a path to growth again. It's not about how do we stop the decline of our business, but to find another billion dollar business for us. I'm not interested in how to I sell more MP3s on Amazon or to create new competitors to iTunes. That's important, but that's not going to transform our business. It's difficult in the day-to-day grind to turn a big company around, but it starts with passion. Passion sells. This is how it works."

It's great to see some optimism coming from within one of the major labels, recognizing all of the opportunities out there. Hopefully, it actually leads to something useful.

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In Trying To Capture The Moment, Do We Risk Missing It Altogether?

from the watch-the-moment,-not-the-screen-of-your-camera dept

Earlier this year, in writing about a musician complaining about fans with mobile phones in the audience, we noted that he seemed to be overreacting, but did raise some interesting points about whether people get so focused on documenting an event that they miss experiencing it. Now a columnist at the Toronto Globe & Mail, Ivor Tossell, makes a similar point in worrying about the effort he goes through to capture "events" like beautiful sunsets, when he's not even sure what to do with the photos afterwards. While much of the column focuses on the question of whether or not these digital momentos will last at all, an equally reasonable question is how many special moments are "lost" in the effort of trying to capture them with recording equipment.

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Warner Music To Last.fm: We're Taking Our Music And Going Home

from the lets-make-life-worse-for-fans dept

There they go again... A few weeks back, I suggested that Warner Music would be smart to promote Ethan Kaplan, who is VP of Technology for Warner Brothers Records (a Warner Music Group Subsidiary), because he seemed to understand that the real trick was improving the overall experience people had around music, rather than focusing so narrowly on getting paid for every single usage. At the same time, however, the folks up at Warner Music, led by Edgar Bronfman (who claimed Warner would no longer be at war with music fans despite being the guy who started that war) were going out and suing all kinds of services that made the musical experience better.

As a record label, their job should be to get their musicians' music out into the world in the most convenient way for anyone to enjoy, and to build business models based on that -- just as Kaplan suggested. But, instead, Warner Music continues to be about as anti-consumer as it can possibly be. Its latest move is to have Last.fm remove all Warner Music from its service. Last.fm, which is now owned by CBS, is an exceptionally popular online music listening, discovery and e-commerce site. While it did overstate its "free" music service, it still is rather ridiculous that Warner would decide to take all its music and go home.

Warner should recognize that it needs Last.fm a lot more than Last.fm users need it. There's plenty of music out there, and if they can't find Warner Music on Last.fm, they'll find someone else's music instead.

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Metallica Tries To Embrace The Online Musical Experience -- Gets Halfway There

from the it's-a-step dept

Among folks who follow the news about copyright issues and online music, the band Metallica is rather infamous. After all, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich was the first (and most vocal) musician to come out swinging about how evil Napster was. The band was the first to sue Napster (and some universities for failing to block Napster) back in 2000. It also spent many years complaining about iTunes -- though the band eventually gave in two years ago.

However, this isn't to say that the band hasn't been willing to at least experiment with online music, often in somewhat creative ways. Way back in 2003, while other musicians were jumping on the iTunes train, Metallica did a surprising deal with DSL provider Speakeasy, offering Speakeasy customers who bought a Metallica CD access to other special content including "live recordings, demos, b-sides and other content." In other words, they actually gave people a reason to buy the CD -- but oddly targeted only at the small number of Speakeasy customers.

Given that, perhaps it isn't that surprising that Metallica has now come out with a new website that tries to embrace online music. The new site, Mission Metallica, actually comes out of Ethan Kaplan's group at Warner Brothers Records. Kaplan is the guy we were talking about last week who is hopefully leading Warner in the right direction on music.

As Kaplan notes, the important thing with the new site is that the music is part of the overall experience. The site (in some ways similar to their old deal with Speakeasy) offers a ton of additional content concerning the making of Metallica's latest album and various other things, like contests to win tickets to shows. It also puts in place many of the other aspects of the business model we've been discussing, including a tiered offering a la Trent Reznor and Jill Sobule. That is, the band is offering a variety of options to let people pay for actual value beyond the music.

But... of course, it stops just short of actually making it all the way there. That's because the band isn't releasing any of the digital downloads for free. It still wants people to pay for the downloads -- even though freeing up those downloads would likely attract more people to all those other options (the band, obviously, would disagree, but given Metallica's reputation as being the slayers of Napster, they might be surprised at what a total shift would do for them). It's encouraging that the band has adopted many of the important aspects of recognizing the importance of the experience surrounding music, but it's disappointing that they haven't made it all the way through to the logical conclusion of where that model leads.

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