News has always been a commodity. Media organisations never sold news. They sold advertising. Classified columns. Full-pages. Half-pages.
Now, in the connected age, it is ever more true. News is a commodity and nobody wants to pay for it. Which is a problem, because to report news professionally costs money.
There is one way that a media title can transform to survive in the connected age.
Become a movement. Create a point-of-view. Follow a focus.
The rise of social media has proved again that people want to belong. They want to share. Media organisations should drop the pretence of objectivity, state their allegiance and congregate their followers. Develop and promote rockstar journalists. Sell merchandise. Convert their readers into followers. Give them a sense of tribe. Be honest about what they stand for.
Objectivity is not dead. It just never existed. Now, in order to survive, newspapers need to acknowledge that and turn it into profit.
I’m going to describe what I did to get my Canon LIDE 700F to work with Adobe’s Creative Suite 4. Because extensive googling, binging or praying did not reveal anything useful. It is only through utter persistance that the answer came.
I am going to assume that you have your CS4 installation discs at hand. I am going to assume that you did not use less than standard methods for obtaining your Adobe product. Because you are going to need a very particular file, on a very particular disc in the box to make it work. So if you fall into the pirate category, matey, you might have to just understand the principle and then figure it out for yourself. But then, you are that kind of person who can do that, right?
Step 1: Follow the steps to install the Canon software. You may choose the custom install, and only choose the Scangear installer. No photo-editing software Canon provides on their little disc is going to out-awesome Photoshop.
The most impressive thing about vehicular traffic in India is what it sounds like:
Every car, tuk-tuk, truck, bus or scooter – honking once every few seconds. A collective cacophony of horns rising from a buzzing swarm, each one, a feeble attempt from a vehicle to make his presence, location and track known to every other vehicle.
Of course the result is not so effective. Plenty of cars have plenty of dents. I personally, have been involved in two bashings and I don’t even come to India that often.
And it’s not just the professional drivers who do it. I’ve been driven by people who in the normal course of life and business can be considered to be quite sane, pleasant and normal. And if you ask why do you honk your horn every three seconds they reply: “I don’t know.”
And there, ladies and gentlemen, lies the most powerful metaphor of what is going on in today’s media landscape. Hundreds of thousands of brands, all crawling over the marketplace, each one honking its little horn in an effort to make itself known. Each one, contributing to the drone that is so unpleasant that it literally forces people to try and block their senses by taking such actions as investing in personal video recorders.
And if you really probe and analyse their strategies you’ll see the answer to why they honk is “I don’t know why.”
If you are not doing something that makes you sound different to everybody else, you are just contributing to the noise. And you run the risk of being run over.
A buddy of mine has started to direct commercials and he asked me if I had advice for him. I thought of ten things and then thought it might be useful to post them here, in the ether:
Always make sure there is film in camera
The crew is actually making your film. Respect them and they will
respect you.
Friendship is irrelevant.
Beautiful pictures are shot on happy sets.
Always expect a fuck up.
Pay big bucks for a great DP but keep loads spare for a genius editor.
Storyboard 500 times before your shoot. But be prepared to change
your mind every second.
The director is the invisible energy on the set.
The quality of the gear means less than the quality of the people.
Directing is having three more shots to do and six minutes of
available light and being ready with an answer when the AD turns to
you and asks: “what do you want to do, Guv?”*
* Number 10, if I remember correctly, was once dispensed by David Fincher. I paraphrased from memory.
There is an obvious reason why iTunes’ new Genius feature is good. If I monitor the tweets, posts and status updates of contacts, I can see people are loving iTunes’ newfound ability to make better playlists.
But I think there is a really clever feature at play. Ever since I started playing with it, I can see how much better it would be if I had more music in it. So you develop the urge to buy more music to feed the monster.
It would be interesting to see if iTunes are seeing a spike in sales post the launch of Genius.
In other Apple news. I’m getting a bit miffed with them. I’ve always been a fanboi, but I am becoming increasingly intolerant of their inability to quickly respond to their own mistakes. Like the fact that the podcast directory has disappeared from my iTunes store, just to coincide with the launch of the Apps Store.
Also, today I noticed something else which is just sloppy thinking. If you import a new album for a CD, and you add the album art, you have to do it for each individual song for the album art to show up on your iPod for each song. Why can’t iTunes use the fact that it knows the songs are part of an album, to apply the artwork to all the songs?
Isn’t it annoying when a Web service doesn’t realise that you can append useful tags to your username@gmail in order to create order in your mailbox, and separate mail out?
The New York Times Web site for example, won’t allow registrations to have the + character in them.
