It's me, Pete... from the podcast.

Colin Hay on going indie

Lefsetz Letter from Colin Hay

Colin Hay to Bob Lefsetz:

In 1983, I played with Men At Work to 150,000 people at the US Festival. We broke up shortly  thereafter. After a few years of swanning around, thinking I was quite important, and drinking for Scotland and Australia, I realized I was slowly doing myself in, with the single malts and guinness chasers. Occasionally I had noticed my steel string acoustic in the corner, mocking me with it’s eternal patience and optimism. Eventually I picked it up, and ran away to live in California, to start again. I have been gainfully self- employed ever since.

Thirty-one days ago today I started posting my daily photo. I’ve never been great at these daily things for anything longer than thirty-one days, so we’ll see if it keeps up. So far, it’s been an exercise in patience and tolerance of my own work – work not produced for a particular client, but a more simple celebration of the stuff I happen to like looking at.

Curt Siffert sent me the link to the Hay letter quoted above. We go round and round, me and Curt, about the nature of self-employment and freelancing and whatnot. And in all our late night mason jar wine talks, we’ve never gotten to the language that hit me so squarely above. “Occasionally I had noticed my steel string acoustic in the corner, mocking me with it’s eternal patience and optimism. Eventually, I picked it up and ran away to live in California, to start again.”

That’s what it felt like for me, at least, August 1, 2007, when I quit the corporate job, finally succumbing to the call of the gear, the cameras, the computers. It felt like running away, somewhere new, to start again.

Last year, the fantastic Jake Oken-berg invited me to photograph his show at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland. I didn’t know when I agreed to shoot that Jake was opening for Hay that night. I’ve had Colin Hay’s music in my head since I was about 8 years old, so it’s no stretch when I say I nearly swallowed my tongue at the opportunity, the chance to meet the guy, to snap a picture maybe.

Thanks to Jake, I made the picture. It’s today’s daily photo. I obviously can’t begin to speculate what’s going on in his head in this picture, but the look on his face? It captures every bit of what’s going on in mine. I didn’t know it at the time, but I like to think that had you asked me when I was 8 what picture I’d like to make of Colin Hay one day, this is the picture I would have described.

I also got this picture with Hay, in which I look like a goofy South Park kid, the one who hasn’t bathed, standing next to a celebrity who has taken note of the stench and is quite uncomfortable as a result.

Dammit.

Nate Silver weighs in on the NYTimes pricing messiness

A Note to Our Readers on the Times Pay Model and the Economics of Reporting – NYTimes.com

Nate Silver on the FiveThirtyEight blog on the NYTimes:

I’m less sympathetic to the notion, however, which I’ve heard in some quarters, that there are a lot of good substitutes for The New York Times. Certainly there are some good substitutes: depending on the type of coverage you’re looking for, The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal or CNN or ESPN.com. Of course, some of these substitutes already charge for digital access, are also having trouble balancing their budgets, or both.

Maybe that’s an issue in some quarters. That’s certainly not my issue. There is little question that the Times is the Paper of Record for original reporting in the US. From Silver’s own tally, that’s pretty clear. My problem is that the pricing model provides incentive to support the status quo: if you take the dead-tree paper, you get the digital edition comped. To get the digital edition only, it generally costs a little bit more.

For example, to get the digital edition exclusively, it’s $15 every four weeks. To get the digital edition comped, I have to pay for the Monday-Friday subscription plan at $3.70 per week, or $14.80 every four weeks. The Sunday Edition is $3.75 per week, or $15 every four weeks.

There’s a really good argument to be made that the times is spot on in their pricing – that for $15 every four weeks, if you’re a Sunday subscriber – you’re getting significantly more value digitally by getting 100% of the Times content every day on your mobile or tablet device. That’s a good thing, to be sure.

But, the thing is, there’s no “Five Easy Pieces” solution. What I want is the digital edition, all the time, every day, and I want them to hold the paper. I do an awful lot, I’m sure, that is not pro environment. I don’t recycle every carton that comes across my kitchen. I probably flush the toilet too often. But there’s little out there to compare with destroying tens of thousands of trees every day to present information when another viable approach exists. I’m not keen on paying into that model anymore when an alternative choice exists.

I wish the Times offered a solution that supported guys like me, a progressive pricing model that encouraged digital consumption with no paper requirement.

NYTimes Pricing Mess

Daring Fireball Linked List: The Daily’s Pricing

One more thought on The Times’s pricing: What’s the thinking behind charging more to use their iPad app than their smartphone apps? If I’m paying for the content, what difference does it make how big my screen is? To me, the extra $5/month they’re charging for iPad app access indicates that they see iPad users as suckers to be fleeced.

Insane. They’re back-pocketing failure here. If the Times digital initiative fails, it’s because they can’t afford – or refuse – to admit that they’ll have to destroy their print production infrastructure to make digital succeed absolutely. It will suck. People will lose their jobs. But at some point, the change will happen, and either the Times will be at the heart of it, or they won’t. The problem with the latter is that they end up looking dumb and irrelevant, and all their best reporters will go to work for HuffPo. Worlds collide, indeed.

Twitter and Facebook go live with HTTPS

Go turn this on. Twitter > Settings > Account > then scroll all the way to the bottom and make sure “Always use HTTPS. is checked.

While I’m at it, you can now do the same thing with Facebook. Select Account > Account Settings > and scroll down until you see Account Security. Make sure ”Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible" is checked.

Use Churnalism.com to detect spam news

The Daily Maverick :: Internet kills the PR star: The all-new DIY churnalism detector

Now, eight decades or so later, we have churnalism.com. A non-commercial site funded by the Media Standards Trust, it allows users to paste in press releases and compare them with all the news in the UK’s national papers, as well as with stories on the BBC site and Sky News online. The word “churnalism” comes from Nick Davies’s book “Flat Earth News,” and means exactly what it appears to mean – an item in a newspaper published as journalism that is, in fact, a barely reworked press release.

Churnalism.com. Handy tool, that.

More on Aol’s big bag of awesome announcement today – funnies from Paul Carr

Aol To Journalists: You Be The Rock Star, We’ll Be Mark Chapman

Paul Carr with strategies for Aol to improve the bottom line.

  • Only completely restructuring the entire company three times a week, instead of five.

  • Ending the company’s popular “let’s burn all our money” Fridays.

  • Increasing the cost of AOL dial-up and broadband to $10,000 a month “because those fucking idiots will buy anything.”

  • …

  • Making all potential editorial hires take a Turing test and rejecting any who pass.

There’s more. Worth a quick read.

Aol to rediscover love for inhouse journalists

AOL to Cut Up to 900 Jobs as It Integrates Huffington Post – Bloomberg

Says the man who brought us “The Aol Way:”

“AOL will invest more heavily in our in-house editorial team and transition away from a reliance on freelance journalists,” he said. “Journalists are the heart and soul of a media company.”

 

Willy Loman – Harold Bloom – Google Books

Arthur Miller on his motivations for writing Death of a Salesman:

"…there was the smell in the air of a new American Empire in the making…and I wanted to set before the new captains and the so smugly confident kings the corpse of a believer”

Willy Loman – Harold Bloom – Google Books

River Clegg on buying the happiness thing

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Buying This Thing Will Make Me Happy.

Other people will look up to me because I own this thing and use it frequently, which will make me very happy. When I’m at a party, for instance, I can wait for a moment when people start talking about how cool it looks from the latest advertisement. Then I can stroll over and take it out and start using it, pretending that I hadn’t heard their conversation, and I can look up casually and wink at them. They’re sure to be impressed. Only I haven’t decided about the wink yet, because maybe it would make it obvious that I had heard their conversation. The wink may have to be something I decide in the moment.

I want one. I don’t care what color it is. I’m happier already thinking about this moment, someday, in my life.

James Fallows and the case for plum resignation when it comes to journalism

Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media, James Fallows:

Fifteen years ago, I published a book, Breaking the News, which argued that a relentless focus on scandal, spectacle, and the “game” of politics was driving citizens away from public affairs, making it harder for even the least cynical politicians to do an effective job, and at the same time steadily eroding our public ability to assess what is happening and decide how to respond. And this was in an era that in retrospect seems innocent.

Not that we need any more evidence that the nature of journalism has changed. But that, really, is the crux and Journalism has changed. It’s now lower-case-j journalism for the most part, and to find Journalism that matters anymore, the responsibility is on us to seek it out.

That’s not to say that what Gawker does is inherently bad. I read Gawker properties all the time. But the organization is representative of how habits have changed seemingly over night.

Wired on the evolving digital story

The Art of Immersion: Why Do We Tell Stories? | Epicenter | Wired.com, Frank Rose:

We stand now at the intersection of lure and blur. The future beckons, but we’re only partway through inventing it. We can see the outlines of a new art form, but its grammar is as tenuous and elusive as the grammar of cinema a century ago.

We know this much: people want to be immersed. They want to get involved in a story, to carve out a role for themselves, to make it their own. But how is the author supposed to accommodate them? What if the audience runs away with the story? And how do we handle the blur—not just between fiction and fact, but between author and audience, entertainment and advertising, story and game? A lot of smart people—in film, in television, in video games, in advertising, in technology, even in neuroscience—are trying to sort these questions out. The Art of Immersion is their story.

Make your kids write by hand. According to smart people, it’s important

How writing by hand makes kids smarter – The Week

Heather Horn in The Atlantic Wire says that while all this research is fascinating, it mostly shows that “scientists are finally beginning to explore what writers have long suspected.” She notes a 1985 article in the Paris Review in which the interviewer asks novelist Robert Stone if he mostly types his manuscripts. His reply: “Yes, until something becomes elusive. Then I write in longhand in order to be precise. On a typewriter or word processor you can rush something that shouldn’t be rushed — you can lose nuance, richness, lucidity. The pen compels lucidity.”

Then, go buy a pen.

Michael DeGusta debunks Bain analysis on declining music industry, then increases decline of music industry

The REAL Death Of The Music Industry

No one seems to have tracked it back to the original source  nor noticed what happened to catch my eye straight away: This chart sucks.

This is a great piece on the decline of music sales. What’s interesting to me, as hard as it is for the “industry” to adjust to change, independent artists seem to be finding their way in this new world. Overhead is lower when you’re on your own, and you keep more ducats on what you sell, and you need fewer fans to justify your existence.

Seems like getting out from under big labels and embracing the power of the single might just be smart business.

Mark Harris: “The Day the Movies Died”

The Day the Movies Died: Movies + TV: GQ

With that in mind, let’s look ahead to what’s on the menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children’s book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon. One sequel with a 4 in the title. Two sequels with a 5 in the title. One sequel that, if it were inclined to use numbers, would have to have a 7 1/2 in the title.1

Grim.

Dead Island Trailer

This is horrifying, but for those of us who celebrate the Zombie oeuvre, it’s one of the most beautiful pieces of CGI storytelling I’ve seen of late. If you’re a father with a daughter, don’t watch. It’ll kick you in the face.