Saving Newspapers From Their Slow Suicide

Fifteen years ago no one in news reporting knew what to do with the Internet. The general consensus of analysts was newspapers should put their content online, but the only way to make money was to offer it a paid subscriber only service.

But that made no sense, people who subscribed to the paper already received the paper, and people who only read it on the Internet either had no direct means of payment — if they lived out of province, for example — or they didn’t want to pay for a full subscription only for the privilege of reading two or three stories a week on their favourite team.

Advertising fifteen and ten years ago consisted almost entirely of banner and clutter advertising. All of which made reading websites a chore rather than something enjoyable. So using advertising to make money was an excellent way to make sure people didn’t read your newspaper online.

So newspapers and magazines started to put their content online for free. And it was this decision which is responsible for the slow death of print news media today.

Because, in retrospect, it’s not Twitter and blogs and Facebook that are responsible for the slow death of print news media, it was the decision by the print news media to relinquish total control over their brand and their product as soon as it’s published.

The print news media could have, should have, never given their product to the Internet… at least not without an explanation.

The decision fifteen years ago to give their product away was a defeat, it was done because everyone told them it was inevitable. Since then everyone has treated print media as though the entire industry was on a death watch.

But it’s a self inflicted death, it’s suicide not murder.

It’s as though the print news media has been sitting back waiting for the inevitable. Every decision they’ve made, every strategy they’ve undertaken regarding the Internet, has taken them one step closer to obscurity.

So called “New Media” cannot exist without print journalism, that’s the irony. News published on Twitter, Facebook and general blogs is reprinted mostly from print reporting. Social network companies then make money off the personal information people give up willingly to be included in them, then from advertising surrounding the content.

And, just like YouTube, the content of the social network firms is provided entirely for free by the users — as we are the content providers for the social networking business.

So the business model print news media has selected for itself for the past ten years involves giving away it’s content for free to anyone who wants it, these people then post it to social networks — which exist only because their content is provided for free, and which then profit greatly from the free content.

Keeping in mind Facebook, as it’s currently valued, is worth more than the print news media industry in North America.

It’s the complete lack of ideas coming from the print news industry, and their acceptance of the perception of their inevitable irrelevancy that’s so infuriating. There’s no fight when someone makes the claim bloggers are the reporters of the future. Or that print news is dead.

The famous 1994 quote from Conrad Black, where he called reporters “ignorant, lazy, opinionated, intellectually dishonest and inadequately supervised hacks”, fits with the vision the owners of print news media have had with their business for the past decade.

Ironically, the quote definitely also applies to the “new media” industry which almost entirely relies on untrained and barely motivated people who blog and “tweet” for their profits.

When newspapers like the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer close, all of the knowledge and sources and information gathered by those reporters is lost. There is power in group reporting that blogging cannot hope to match.

A blogger might be a source, but she’ll never open a foreign affairs bureau in Beijing.

But this isn’t about which delivery system is better, or more accurate, or which is easier to hold accountable, it’s about the resignation of the print news media to its obsolescence.

Why have there been no television commercials or print advertisements showing what kind of power and ability the print news media really has? Why no television ads showing a lone blogger looking into the Hells Angels? Why no commercials showing someone walking around trying to report on genetically modified foods by updating their Twitter account?

Why are newspapers so timid about explaining to people what services they really offer? Why are they so willing to continue to take part in their own demise?

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The Hyperbole Of Hope And The Inevitability Of Change

President Elect Obama won the election, yet Senator McCain didn’t lose so much as he came in a very close second. The person electors wanted to punish was President Bush, and they have.

The almost-former President’s place in history has been set in stone with this election. There will be no redemption. His will forever be known as the “Idiot Presidency”. Everything he “accomplished” will be forever eclipsed by the absolutely historic election of an African-American president. The Bush legacy will be reduced to books written about the lies used to get into a second Iraq war, and the disgraceful response to Hurricane Katrina.

Ding dong the wicked witch is dead. But she had been on life support for four years and wasn’t expected to live much longer anyway, so taking credit for her death after sticking a sword in a her lifeless body, and dancing on her grave after her body had already been put into the ground might be justified by the amount of relief which needed to be released, but it’s hardly a victory.

President Obama is a remarkable person, with a remarkable personal narrative, and his election to the presidency is an incredible testament to the historical narrative of the United States. But his election owes almost as much to American dislike, even hatred, of a president who would have been gone in a few months no matter who was running.

The strategy of the campaign commercials run on American networks by the Democrats was to tie Mr. McCain and other Republican candidates to President Bush, the least respected President in a hundred years. But after raising US$600,000,000 and spending a record amount of money, after running against President Bush’s mostly inept eight-year record, President Obama’s margin of victory in the national “popular vote” was only five percent.

The political spectrum of the United States is still as divided the day after President Obama’s election as it was a few years ago, essentially there’s only been a six point swing from 2004. It’s the years of Left v. Right hyperbole and rhetoric that have been wiped away, not the problems or issues facing Americans.

President Obama cannot force people to buy cars and houses, so the auto sector will continue to collapse and the housing market will continue to find its bottom. Thousands of jobs will continue to be lost in every economic sector, and thousands more Americans will lose whatever tiny bits of health coverage they had left.

The American debt is over eleven trillion dollars. The ability to erase the deficit, let alone the debt, will be almost impossible during a recession. Which means both will inevitably rise, and the economy of the United States will get worse before it will get better.

The first contact Europe will have with President Obama will be when he tells Spain, Germany and Italy to commit troops to the front line in Afghanistan. But while those governments have already committed troops to Afghanistan, they also refuse to allow their troops leave their bases and engage in any combat roll.

During the election Mr. Obama repeatedly said he wants to renegotiate NAFTA, but Canada has no interest in doing so and the agreement cannot be opened without the participation of the other partners.

As American influence in Iraq wanes, Iran’s will rise. The American military has been abused for sixteen years, from being was cut apart during the Clinton Presidency to spending six consecutive years fighting two wars. Fixing the military during a war will be almost impossible, and every day the American military is in Iraq and/or Afghanistan only adds to the economic deficit.

I imagine there’ll be a great number of people who will be walking on air over the next few months, and maybe even years, but to fix what is actually wrong with the United States will require years, probably even decades to repair.

The “hope” Americans voted for lies in the cleanliness which comes with a new President, and only in the potential for something new. American politics is very much like its own unique brand of Evangelical Christianity in that every four to eight years all of the electorate’s sins are absolved, as long as they admit their guilt by voting in a new direction.

The “change” President Obama promised has come and gone with the election. The United States has fundamentally changed with his election. Now President Obama himself is the “hope”, not his policies. The problems his country faces are large, and will take time to fix, but they are ultimately ordinary. And because the problems are ordinary his solutions to the problems must be standard and ordinary.

The majority of people who voted for Barack Obama did so out of their intense belief in his ability. But he was elected as President based on the fears some had of a continuation of a Bush Presidency, the desire of others to punish a Bush Presidency, and by people who wanted to again feel hope for their country. It will be interesting to watch him work in the mundane spaces. And whether that ordinary work will continue to inspire those who voted for “hope” or against President Bush.

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Ten Years Ago SCAN Could’ve Had Me Evicted But Activists Nearly Did It On Their Own

A friend of mine raised some concerns on her blog about Bill 106 – ‘The Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods Act’, which was recently introduced into the Ontario Legislature as a private members Bill by Ottawa Centre Liberal MPP Yasir Naqvi. This post is an extension of the comments I left as responses to her post.

Twelve years ago I was living in a rooming house in Hintonburg, at the time it was probably the worst neighbourhood in Ottawa.

Back in 1996 prostitutes and their johns were having afternoon sex in the park, parents and their kids were always finding handfuls of needles in the sandbox, and when I got home late at night it was expected there’d be emergency vehicles somewhere.

What they did to clean it up, from memory, was form a community action team which took down license-plate numbers of johns, they patrolled the parks at night in shifts, they cleaned the playgrounds everyday, they monitored their neighbours for suspicious behaviours and they had a direct tip line to the police.

I was one of those neighbours exhibiting suspicious behaviours. So were the other people living in the rooming house. Mostly because we were the poorest people on the street, but we were also the scariest as well. My 50-year old down-the-hall neighbour and friend, “Wild Bill”, was a 5′10″ 240lb, weight lifting, solvent huffing, ex-biker with swastika tattoos and a massive beard. And there were always alcoholics or addicts in the early stages of recovery coming and going from the house.

One of the tactics my neighbours used to clean up their neighbourhood, at least my little piece of it, was to call 911 to report seeing someone walk into the rooming house carrying a gun. I woke up to the tactical team a few times, but there were never any guns. We were not a crack house… if anything we were an early-recovery house.

However, I do think they did the right thing. I really do. I think the neighbourhood had gotten so out of control that extreme measures were warranted. Even if I was an occasional target.

Back in 1996 I had just walked home from downtown and was in the back of the Mac’s Milk trying to decide between chocolate milk and pop. It was 2am and I was listening to White Zombie on my Walkman. When I turned around there were five kids screaming at the clerk. Then three of them started stuffing their jackets with junk food while the other two started punching the clerk, trying to get at the cash.

After I chased the kids into the street the youngest one, the police later told me he was thirteen, turned and pulled a paring knife out of his pocket. But his buddies were already running so he did as well. When the police arrived, in an effort to find and maybe identify the kids, one of them took me on my first community tour of Hintonburg. We drove slowly down a block and he showed me the crack house. Then he showed me the one on the next block, and the next block, then the park where the wet condoms would be left on the playground equipment.

I recently walked through the area a few months ago for the first time since moving away. I walked along Wellington from Parkdale Avenue all the way east to the bridge near Bayswater. Most, if not all of the architecture is the same, and there’s still an edge to the whole area, but the people and the contents of the shops were all different.

According to Hintonburg.com, Hintonburg was named as “one of the top ten emerging neighbourhoods in Canada” by enRoute magazine in its April, 2007 edition. And according to a 2008 editorial in the Ottawa Citizen “the changing nature of the neighbourhood is fascinating to watch… There is a hip, urban edge.”

Since his piece of Ottawa seems to be in full recovery mode, maybe it shouldn’t be totally unexpected provincial Liberal MPP Yasir Naqvi, whose Ottawa-Centre riding includes Hintonburg, would be responsible for introducing Bill 106 into the legislature. The private members Bill would give community action groups direct access to serious legal powers by creating “a [municipal] Director of Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods” for them to report serious incidents.

The biggest difference between the Bill and the tactics used by the Hintonburg community group back in 1996, and the point of biggest contention, is “[t]he Director can then apply to Superior Court to evict the tenant or close the property for up to 90 days through a ‘Community Safety Order’.” But right now the Ottawa Police Service Street Crime Unit, for example, works closely with local community groups, and together they do try to get the landlords of the crack houses involved in getting the squatters removed, or the property cleaned, through the courts.

Even the “anonymous allegations of unsafe or illegal activities”, and the “powers to conduct surveillance of accused tenants and homeowners”, are already in place between community groups and the police. Besides, the Hintonburg people back in 1996 had no problem doing either.

According to the Kingston Whig-Standard the legislation “would apply only if a municipality opts in to the program.” Kingston city council actually sent a proposal to the Ontario government pressing for the legislation last year, soon after Ottawa did the same. The City of Hamilton has also done the same. Actually most provinces have similar legislation, but they force their cities into the program. Ontario would be the only province to allow cities to opt in or out.

Personally I’d prefer to formalize this stuff to at least give the local activists some guidelines. Hintonburg did what they had to do to make their neighbourhood livable, and they managed to do it without breaking any existing laws and without anyone making any new ones for them. But they had a lot of help and input from the police. Not every community is so lucky.

…just an aside… I think what’s really bothering me is there are Hintonburg people — new,old or both — who are forming a new action committee against this Bill. After all the crap those fuckers put me and my friends though they should at least remember their own history, because it seems to me they got their area all nice and sparkley by using tactics very similar to those in this Bill. There are serious reasons not to like Bill-106, but if they get all “holier-than-thou” after what they did ten years ago it would really piss me off. Anyway.

The problem with “cleaning up” neighbourhoods, of course, is everyone just moves. Before Hintonburg it was the Vanier region of Ottawa where the majority of the problems where. There are serious urban social problems in every city, and treating the neighbourhoods like they were snow globes where all you do every ten years is turn everything upside down and let us all scatter to a new part of town is not a solution.

The legislation, as it stands now, would require the new agency to find out if the people being evicted have a place to stay, and if not information or arrangements for short-term accommodations would be made available. But that sounds vague and unenforceable.

But I can still see where this, or similar legislation, would make it easier for people living in “at risk” neighbourhoods who don’t have access to the activist talent pool Hintonburg had…

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There Is A Connection Between 59 Percent Voter Turnout And Four 36 Day Elections In A Row

Voter turnout has been taking a nosedive over the past fifteen years because 1. the Canada Elections Act put a 36-day minimum on campaigning, and 2. the federal parties figured out that if you have $50 million dollars to spend over an election campaign it’s better value to do it over 36 days instead of 70.

Just twenty years ago voter turnout was 75.3%. The Liberal Party called elections in 1997, 2000, 2004 and 2006, all of which ran the absolute bare minimum of thirty-six days. Voter turnout since 1997 has fallen below 70% each year until this years 59% turnout (1997: 67%; 2000: 61.2%, 2004: 60.9%, 2006: 64.7%).

What has increased over the same amount of time, however, is ideology over policy as election strategy. Instead of having reasoned debate and time to understand what the policies are, Canadian politics has been reduced to leaders literally accusing each other of wanting to destroy the country. In all four elections, including the one the Liberals lost in 2004, the only platform that mattered was “hidden agenda”. As in “they” have one, and only the “I” can keep you safe from it.

The issue in all four elections was the same: fear. There were no substantial reasons for the 1997, 2000 and 2004 elections, for example, other than the ruling governments believed the opposition parties were in enough disarray an election victory was guaranteed. And they were short because longer elections left too many variables, while the shortest possible election meant more weight to platitudes and one-liners.

Because there’s no time to lay out new policies, or discuss and even change them. Shorter election times means spending more time pre-election demonizing your opponent so we “get” their message in the short campaign. Shorter election times mean ideologues are given the opportunity to set the agenda, and with such a low minimum keeping the electorate as uninvolved as possible has become a strategy.

Since the 1993 election Canadians have decided the makeup of our government based on no platforms, no serious debate and at the whim of whichever special interest group can whip up a concert overnight.

Before the 1993 election — then the shortest at 47 days, and with a 69.6% turnout — Canada had some of the largest voter turnouts of any democracy. Now, after four consecutive 36-day elections, we don’t. Increase the minimum, force the parties to defend their platform over a significant time, and give people time to figure out what’s going on and the numbers will go back up.

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* This is mostly in response to some comments on Thorora’s blog. She’s thinking of moving to Sweden, so I thought I’d offer an alternative because, really, Sweden sucks.

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