Posts tagged as:

media

New York Times to Charge for Web Content

by Ben Atlas on 01.20.2010.10:07am

Great news, hopefully all medai sources follow this example. I have no doubt it will be more profitable than the print news ever was.The Times to Charge for Frequent Access to Its Web Site:

“The New York Times announced Wednesday that it intended to charge frequent readers for access to its Web site, a step being debated across the industry that nearly every major newspaper has so far feared to take.

Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site.”

“Early 2001″, why not now?

Boston Tea Party with Senator Scott Brown

by Ben Atlas on 01.20.2010.1:21am

Some of the photos I took at the post-election party in and around Park Plaza Hotel today. ►►►read more

Leib Tropper and the Jewish Media Postmortem

by Ben Atlas on 12.25.2009.9:07am

In the wake of the Leib Tropper scandal, it occurred to me that the reasons I started the media company few years back are still intact. The Jewish blogs are still run by the illiterate and the unenlightened, the repetitive “cut and paste” brigade. Narrowcasting a niche in the most provincial sense of that description. The style is the reflexive regurgitation, the vigilante vegetarianism around the sacred cows. The firm determination of leaving no question unasked. The monotonous alphabet glued apart by the toxic slime of anonymity.

The Jewish MSM media is still like a camel in an ice ring. The cliché clinic. Hopelessly out of the required shallowness. Assuming the target audience of an average autistic child on a deserted island but lacking in juvenile mischief  required for covering the heimisher stories. The paper rags are neuvo skilled in paraphrasing the blogs so that the aforementioned blogs have something to “cut and paste” about.

My Blog is the 2nd Coming of the Jüdischer Verlag

by Ben Atlas on 12.23.2009.10:47pm

1902. Founders of the Jüdischer Verlag. Seated: Berthold Feiwel, Martin Buber, Standing: E. M. Lilien, Chaim Weizmann, and Davis Trietsch.

Gelman Library: “The Jüdischer Verlag was founded in Berlin months after Martin Buber demanded the establishment of a publishing house at the 5th Zionist Congress. It was designed to be a “central agency for the promotion of Jewish literature, art and scholarship.” During the more than three decades of its existence, it achieved most of its goals by publishing a broad variety of translations from Hebrew and Yiddish literature, scholarly works on Jewish issues, and a wide spectrum of German Jewish literature and Zionist ideology. Around the turn of the century, the illustrations of E.M. Lilien and Hermann Struck in the publications of the Jüdischer Verlag reflected the first attempts to make not only the contents but also the exterior of Jewish books more attractive. By the end of the Weimar period, bibliographic activities had become a distinct and well-organized field in the cultural landscape of German Jews.

Simon Dubnow

The Jüdischer Verlag was perhaps the greatest contributor to the formation of a full view of Jewish history and culture. It published both the Jüdische Lexicon and the Goldschmidt Talmud translation, the first complete German translation of the Babylonian Talmud that Lazarus Goldschmidt began around the turn of the century and finished in the Weimar period. The Jüdischer Verlag also produced the pioneering ten-volume World History of the Jewish People, by Russian-Jewish historian Simon Dubnow. Dubnow was living in Berlin from 1922-1933 and had originally written his oeuvre in Russian. However, it first appeared in its German translation by Dr. Ahron Steinberg. Steinberg also translated Dubnow’s most important Hebrew work, the two-volume history of Hassidism.”

The Tropper Detour

by Ben Atlas on 12.23.2009.8:57pm

During my littler detour into the Leib Tropper story I have gone back to reading some of the familiar URLs  in the Jewish Blogosphere. The posts and the comments are pointless and disappointing. This is how Micha Josef Berdyczewski must have felt when he came back to Ukraine. The utter hopelessness and despair for the form and the content. I have pioneered the space and it saddens me that in the end the mirror can’t help it but reflect back the disfigured face of that culture. There is really not a single blog at the moment that has the seriousness or the ordinal insight worthy of attention. The monotonous, numb, visually unappealing regurgitation. The ever interchangeable buckets of gossip and the denominational dogma. These things don’t turn quickly, if ever.

Media Stats, Matters, Yankees and Red Sox

by Ben Atlas on 11.5.2009.9:14am · 0 comments

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This post is a collection of links and thoughts about media and statistics.

Marc Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, posts about the recent TV rating records across all major sports leagues:

“The internet has trained us. It has trained us to assign two distinct values to content that is available to us, regardless of media. The 1st variable is participation value. The 2nd variable is shelf life. The two variables go hand in hand.”

Read the post but to be honest I often find Marc’s written logic confusing. I will try my spin on it. People essentially are social creatures. We want to talk and tell stories and sports became a common conversational thread, something we can safely talk about without offending anyone’s feelings. A perfect metaphor of struggle, hope and defeat, the mirror of the society divided into super rich and poor and the byproduct of this culture – the obsession with celebrities. To illustrate this I noticed something during my walks around the Cleveland Circle Reservoirs in Chestnut Hill where a Blue Heron took a permanent residence. People who linger to look at the Heron are couples or groups of friends, while single walkers or runners just pass it by. My conclusion is the people don’t just want to stare at the bird; they want to talk about it. Blue Heron is interesting only as a subject of conversation, a story.

And this brings me to the new obsessive radio talk channel in Boston on 98.5 FM. The anchors Felger & Massarotti zeroed in on the question of the high ratings for the Yankees playoff baseball games in Boston – “do people watch baseball because they hate Yankees and hope to see them lose?” And the overwhelming response to the radio station- indeed people hate Yankees more than they love Red Sox and it seems that as much as people would like Red Sox to win they would be equally excited to see Yankees lose [sorry, not this year]. Again this seems like a familiar metaphor.

Next is the wake Up Call: CNN’s Election Coverage Finishes Fourth. So I am thinking people often have an explanation that seems perfectly plausible for years or more. Everyone, even at the CNN was convinced that Fox’s superior rating during the eight years of the Bush administration could be explained by the access to the ruling party. In other words the ratings had nothing to do with the actual broadcasts. Fore years the producers and the fans had a perfect excuse.

Finally there is a new research showing that 8% of Internet Users Account for 85% of all [ads] Clicks. Across all media products there are your core users, inevitably and surprisingly, the number lingers only around 5%. These are your blog commentators, your regular readers, people who actually buy after they walk into a store. There is always a tiny minority that actually gets it.

And almost forgot about this. Jason Kotte links to the exchange between Michael Turner and Brian Joseph Davis – Books have stalled:

“[The book] is stalled out, in terms of technology, at 1500 AD, and sociologically at around 1930.”

Meaning:

“Literature in book form, and discussion around it, was the mark of education, of the gentry and petit bourgeois. Literature in book form never really found a place in mass produced, post WW2 middle class culture.” ["TV and radio took over as the cultural currency around then."]

Photo via flickr/stefbra. Poland, Lodz, Tramwajowa Street

Philip Roth- “against all those screens a book couldn’t measure up”

by Ben Atlas on 10.26.2009.11:19am · 0 comments

Philip Roth on the future on a Novel in his recent interview:

“I was being optimistic about 25 years really. I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range…”

“To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by – it’s hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities…”

“The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete [in the] beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen,” Roth said. “Now we have all those screens, so against all those screens a book couldn’t measure up.”

Calcified Patterns

by Ben Atlas on 10.25.2009.10:51am · 0 comments

People engage utopian projections and learn to recognize a subset of calcified patterns. The way people consume media is by seeking familiar and recognizable patterns. People don’t what “news” per se, what they want is an information stream that amplifies and reinforces already fully formed opinions, the opinions that reflect utopian projection onto the past. If one is to start reflecting and reacting metaphorically in real time about the present, he or she becomes invisible. The present is undetected by a culture defined by familiar patterns, there is nothing to recognize, no calcified patterns to confirm.

The Most Important Priority for Education

by Ben Atlas on 10.15.2009.9:53am · 0 comments

Giovannino de'Grassi, Gothic letters from a model book Illumination. Parchment, Biblioteca Civica, Bergamo. 1390

I will give you a one sentence solution on how to improve education on a personal and national level. In fact if implemented by a country I guarantee that this country will be propelled into the economic leadership virtually instantaneously. The invention of the alphabet set the stage for current civilization. More specifically Judaic civilization runs on Hebrew, the Roman Empire on Latin, Islam on Arabic, philosophy on Greek, etc. Reformation set the stage for the vernacular, the printing press, literature, journalism, theater, industrialization and modern world as we know it. These are all codes, programming languages civilizations use. In the world defined by the Internet people communicate via a programming code. At the moment, similarly to the dawn of the original language based civilizations, only geeky priests can read and write and often they rip the financial benefit. Any nation that takes seriously the programming literacy and introduces computer science into schools is the clear contender for leadership. Douglas Rushkoff writes about this – It’s not too late for humanity to survive the digital:

“Computers and networks finally offer us the ability to write. And we do write with them. But the underlying capability of the computer era is actually programming—which almost none of us really knows how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our blog text in the appropriate box on the screen. We teach kids how to use software to write, but not how to write software. This means they have access to the capabilities given to them by others, but not the power to determine the value-creating capabilities of the technology for themselves.

Like those failed media renaissances before this one, we remain one step behind the capability actually being offered us. Only an elite—sometimes a new elite, but an elite nonetheless—gain the ability to fully exploit the new medium on offer. The rest learn to be satisfied with gaining the ability offered by the last new medium. The people hear while the rabbis read; the people read while those with access to the printing press write; we write, while our techno-elite program. As a result, a majority of people remain one dimensional leap of awareness and capability behind those who manage to monopolize access to the real power of any media age.”

If computer is at the center of our civilization than being able to write in computer speak is the basis of literacy. The choice is pretty stark, slavery to the new priesthood or freedom. And I know the American sentiment. The only way to earn the freedom in the new world is to master the written language. Towards this immediate goal teaching of computer science in schools is the most important priority for education. The old argument that all those “machines” are just the chariots for content is undermined by the reality that the costs of content gravitates to zero, while the price of platforms that run the content scales exponentially. Yet there is a concern that this skill is outsourceable. Indeed there are scribes who could be compared to the copier monks during the manuscript era. Yet the original texts and supervision of the scribes is still very much by the new priesthood, capable or reading and writing the canonical codex.

Image published with permission from the Web Gallery of Art

Referencing Shirky and Keen

by Ben Atlas on 10.8.2009.10:37am · 0 comments

Nieman Lab linked to a four part presentation What’s Next for News? A Conversation About the Future of News at the Canadian Journalism Project. I find this middle 20 min clip especially interesting. ►►►read more

Content was always free?

by Ben Atlas on 09.20.2009.6:57pm · 0 comments

I read something really fascinating and it’s inevitably a set up for disappointment, mainly because I don’t have people around me who are interested in the same subjects and are tolerably informed to converse on acceptable level. The seminal essay from Paul Graham is such and example. Still I am going to write it down, just to hear the clarity of my own echo – Post Medium Publishing:

“Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.”

In fact no matter what is written in a printed on book it costs between $15 to $25 dollars. The only differentiating factor is the number of books sold. The cost of the book is the cost of physical publishing plus the cost of time spend on writing this book. If the author is famous one can increase the fee based on projected sales. But again this doesn’t change the cost of the book, in other words, the cost of the book is the cost of physical production, content is irrelevant.

Content value is excluded from the cost of media as we know it. This is also true for $15 CDs, etc. I am not sure I agree will all the predictions there, I am not a big fan of any predictions. But the plain sight observation about the cost of media is an eye opener.

Rushkoff says Movements are Kaput

by Ben Atlas on 08.16.2009.7:27am · 5 comments

Douglas Rushkoff in the Arthur Magazine – An End to Movements:

“Mass organization may just have been a twentieth century thing: collective actions of all sorts—good and bad—were responses to the corporatization of government and industry. As such, they took the form of the entities with whom they sought to do battle. But—like the top-heavy, highly abstracted creatures they were created to counter —they are proving utterly incapable of providing an alternative to what they would replace.”

I don’t know if this is because of his book promotion or a style of thinking. But often people get hold of a formula and everything they say is reduced to a template. Perhaps this is the case with Rushkoff, yes we get it,  need to buy more from a local farmer…  And then there are holes in the logic. The rejection of mass movements, that I applaud, doesn’t really explain how America, still a country the last I checked, can be governed. What is being advocated in practical terms, the split of the union into states, small towns? This is a careless flaw in Rushkoff’s logic. Yet he is right and most contemporary thinkers sense the decline of “big”, the decline of mass media and mass movements. Also true that the Obama phenomenon is a contradiction to this trend. Even Obama himself perhaps recognized this fact when he called for “a more perfect union”. So we are either in the midst a last gasp of “big” or indeed searching for the elusive perfection. But despite my objections to Rushkoff’s logic and his final stupid put down of blogs, I find some of his passages simply delicious. Can sign in blood to this paragraph:

“In our current position, when disconnection from the real world is itself a cause for concern, movements only serve to disconnect us further from the actionable. They give us content for websites, language for our bumper stickers, and faces to put on our ideals. But they distract us from the matter at hand, and worse, turn our attention upward toward brand mythologies instead of immediately before us to the people and problems that need our time and energy. In the place of real connections to other people, we get the highly charged but ultimately fake connection to an image.”

Everyone should tape this last paragraph to their mirrors. I might roll a mezuzah out of it. Still Rushkoff is a fascinating thinker but he lacks people around him who have the rigor to challenge and perfect his ideas.

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