The Citizen's Voice: Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice and Loyalty and its Contribution to Media Citizenship Debates

Paper presented to the Philosophy of Communication Division of ICA on 22 May, 2009. Full paper available here, and it will appear in the Sage journal Media, Culture and Society shortly.

The Citizen's Voice: Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice and Loyalty and its Contribution to Media Citizenship Debates

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Cultural Economic Geography: A New Paradigm for Global Communication Studies?

My presentation at the ICA pre-conference. Paper will be available here shortly.

Cultural Economic Geography: A New Paradigm for Global Communication Studies?

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The Chinese Communist Party: why does its membership keep growing?

The Guardian has a feature on the interesting question of why the membership of the Chinese Communist Party continues to grow. The appeal of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought would not appear obvious in 21st century China, and the party would appear to be a long way from its roots in peasant uprisings and the "Long March". But its continued growth continues to pose a challenge for those assuming that democratisation must at some point follow China's transition to a market economy.

Outwardly, the party remains rigidly ideological; members are drilled in Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Three Represents and current president Hu Jintao's Scientific Development Outlook. Hu has, in fact, stepped up political education – perhaps because of an evident disconnect: to many, what the party really stands for is personal advancement, social stability and national unity.

For more read here. Information on the Communist Party of China can be found here.

Todd Gitlin on Journalism in Crisis

Todd Gitlin's Keynote presentation at the Journalism in Crisis conference being held by the University of Westminster can be found here.

It is called "A Surfeit of Crises: Circulation, Revenue, Attention, Authority, and Deference" and it is a rollicking read.

A section can be found below:

The word “crisis” is overused, as is its anodyne opposite, “problem,” or its cousin, “issue.” (As in the highly flexible, “I have issues.”) Ordinary troubles become inflated into “crises” because crises sound somehow more dignified or electrifying. A problem sounds possibly serious, if hypothetically soluble, but a crisis sounds, well, critical. Yet the overuse might lead us to bend over backwards and fall into euphemism—calling a grave matter “a little difficult,” for example, as is common, for some reason, in American discourse today. There are crises. History proceeds by convulsions, not only increments—or rather, increments build up into crises, and before one knows it, the landscape has changed, one is living in a different world, and the world before it changed is barely conceivable and certainly unrecoverable. It was a foreign country; they did things differently there.

In the case of the murky future of journalism, it is fair to speak of crisis—crises, actually. The landscape has changed, is changing, will change—radically. You must know the parable of the boy who cried “wolf.” Just because the overanxious boy kept thinking the wolf was at the door, and sounding a warning to which others became accustomed, and therefore ignored, did not mean that the wolf was not nearby. When the real wolf showed up, no one was ready.

I shall speak primarily of American journalism because it is what I know best, and leave it to you to judge how much this case is typical. Four wolves have arrived at the door simultaneously while a fifth has already been lurking for some time. One is the precipitous decline in the circulation of newspapers. The second is the decline in advertising revenue, which, combined with the first, has badly damaged the profitability of newspapers. The third, contributing to the first, is the diffusion of attention. The fourth is the more elusive crisis of authority. The fifth, a perennial—so much so as to be perhaps a condition more than a crisis—is journalism’s inability or unwillingness to penetrate the veil of obfuscation behind which power conducts its risky business.

For more read here.

Frontera Grill: TV Chef runs Mexican restaurant in Chicago

With some free pre-ICA conference time and pre-conference paper finished (but not Powerpoints), I went off for dinner at Frontera Grill. Chicago wouldn't seem the most obvious American city for Mexican food, but this restaurant was set up by Rick Bayliss. Rick Bayliss is a TV Chef whose program, Mexico: One Plate at a Time, has run for six seasons on PBS.

The food was fabulous. No over-cheesy nachos here. Importantly, what I was impressed by was that Rick tends his own restaurant. A bit greyer than he appears on the books for sale at the front, he was nonetheless watching over the booking desk, and came over to the bar table next to me and fast-tracked a couple over to a table at the main dining area.

This guy isn't having affairs or advising the President on school lunches. When not on the TV, he actually runs his own restaurant. Doubt if I'd see Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay having time to do that.

Be warned tough: it was a 90 minute wait for a table by 6.30pm on a Tuesday, and they don't take advance bookings. You may well be having a pre-dinner margharita.

The Economist on the future of news media

Good analysis from The Economist about the future of news media:

The internet is killing newspapers and giving birth to a new sort of news business

THE race is crowded, but San Francisco stands a fair chance of becoming the first major American city without a daily newspaper. The San Francisco Chronicle, founded in 1865, is trimming its already pared-down staff in an attempt to avoid closure. And if it does disappear? “People under 30 won’t even notice,” says Gavin Newsom, the city’s mayor.

Most industries are suffering at present, but few are doing as badly as the news business. Things are worst in America, where many papers used to enjoy comfortable local monopolies, but in Britain around 70 local papers have shut down since the beginning of 2008. Among the survivors, advertising is dwindling, editorial is thinning and journalists are being laid off. The crisis is most advanced in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but it is happening all over the rich world: the impact of the internet, exacerbated by the advertising slump, is killing the daily newspaper.

Does that matter? Technological change has destroyed all sorts of once-popular products, from the handloom to the Walkman, and the world has mostly been better for it. But news is not just a product: the press is the fourth estate, a pillar of the polity. Journalists investigate and criticise governments, thus helping voters decide whether to keep them or sack them. Autocracies can function perfectly well without news, but democracies cannot. Will the death of the daily newspaper—the main source of information for most educated people for at least the past century, the scourge of corrupt politicians, the conscience of nations—damage democracy?

Picked apart

A newspaper is a package of content—politics, sport, share prices, weather and so forth—which exists to attract eyeballs to advertisements. Unfortunately for newspapers, the internet is better at delivering some of that than paper is. It is easier to search through job and property listings on the web, so classified advertising and its associated revenue is migrating onto the internet. Some content, too, works better on the internet—news and share prices can be more frequently updated, weather can be more geographically specific—so readers are migrating too. The package is thus being picked apart.

The newspaper’s decline is both cause and effect of the worrying finding by the Pew Centre that the number of Americans aged 18-24 who got any news at all the previous day has dropped from 34% to 25% over the past ten years. But that figure may be less troubling than it looks. Because newspapers pack together all sorts of different content, many of those who claimed in the past to have seen some news probably did so for a few seconds before turning the page to the sports scores. Acquaintance as shallow as that with the news is probably no great loss to society; Pew surveys of general knowledge suggest that young people are about as well (or badly) informed as they used to be.

And the newspaper companies’ tribulations do not necessarily presage the demise of the news business, for they stem in part from the tumultuous and expensive transition from paper to electronic distribution. News organisations are currently bearing two sets of costs—those of printing and distributing their product for the old world, and providing digital versions for the new—even though they have yet to find a business model that works online.

Up to now, most have been offering their content free online, but that is unsustainable, because there isn’t enough advertising revenue online to pay for it. So either the amount of news produced must shrink, or readers must pay more. Some publications, such as the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, which has more than 1m online subscribers and has just promised to develop a new system of micropayments for articles, already charge for content. Others will follow: Rupert Murdoch, the Journal’s owner, has said he expects his other titles to start charging too. With news available free on Google and Yahoo!, readers may, of course, not be prepared to pay even for deeper or more specialised stuff; but since they do in the paper world, where free-sheets and paid-for publications coexist, there seems no reason why they wouldn’t online.

Better mobile devices may encourage them to do so. Apple’s iPhone is the first reader-friendly mobile phone, and the latest update to its software, due shortly, will enable news providers that currently give away content on the iPhone to start charging for it. Amazon has just unveiled a new, larger version of the Kindle, its e-book reader, better suited to displaying newspapers. Similar devices are available from other firms, with many more on the way. Better technology coupled with new payment systems will not solve the acute problems faced by newspapers today, but should eventually provide new models to enable news to flourish in the digital age.

And already, there are signs that it will (see article). New sources of news are proliferating online. Many, it is true, are unreliable. Most are badly funded. Some are the rantings of deranged extremists. But some—like Muckety, an American site which enriches news stories with interactive maps of the protagonists’ networks of influence, and NightJack, the revealing and depressing blog of an anonymous British policeman, which won the Orwell prize last month—enhance society’s understanding of itself, and could not have existed in the old world.

But the only certainty about the future of news is that it will be different from the past. It will no longer be dominated by a few big titles whose front pages determine the story of the day. Public opinion will, rather, be shaped by thousands of different voices, with as many different focuses and points of view. As a result, people will have less in common to chat about around the water-cooler. Those who are not interested in political or economic news will be less likely to come across it; but those who are will be better equipped to hold their rulers to account. Which is, after all, what society needs news for.

Note: they don't think pay-per-view news will work. At all. Interestingly, they find evidence that partisanship does work commercially, at least on the short term.

For more see here.

The Media Business: Seeing through the Haze Surrounding Websites, Blogs and Social Media

Media economist Robert Picard provides some notes of caution about easy assumptions that blogging and Twitter are the future of media.

Seeing through the Haze Surrounding Websites, Blogs and Social Media

Communicating regularly is hard work. It takes skill; it takes a voice; it takes having something to say; it takes time. Making money from it is even harder.

The functions provided by websites, blogs, and social media clearly make it possible for people to express themselves in ways never before imagined, to share their opinions, to express their hopes and dreams, and to share the details of their lives. Media companies are watching these developments and many are rushing to provide content on any communication technology or application the public uses.

Although large numbers of people are trying the new technologies, they are reacting to them in different ways. Some find them highly useful and satisfying; some find them worthless and disappointing; some find them a worthy pastime; others find them a waste of time. What this means is that—like all technologies—they are more important to some people than to others. Consequently, managers need to be realistic in assessing their potential, the extent to which they are being used by the public, and the extent to which they provide opportunities that media companies should pursue.

Because those promoting the technologies are self interested, uptake figures are easy to come by. Finding out who has tried the technologies, but decided they were undesirable is harder. However, research is showing some interesting results in that regard. We now know that 60 percent of the people who try Twitter stop using it within a month, that only about 5% of blogs are regularly updated, that more than 200 million blogs have been abandoned, and that about 37 million web domain names are deleted every year.

Most people and organizations who try these new communication opportunities make limited use of them or give up on them altogether because of boredom or because the opportunities don't provide sufficient results. This is not to say they are not unimportant, however. A good number of individuals and companies are using them to create new abilities and opportunities to communicate with friends, colleagues, and customers and to establish new businesses and revenue streams. Doing so, however, takes commitment that most people and firms are unwilling to make.

From the business standpoint one has to be realistic when evaluating the opportunities presented. Media executives need to ask hard questions: Do all media companies need to provide content across every available platform regardless of the cost and effort? Are all types of news and information appropriately carried on all platforms? In what ways is branding and marketing for the company actually served by these engagements? How are these monetized? What are the returns on the investments? What are the risks of not engaging these technologies?

Success is not easy in this technological environment. It requires investment, effort, regular activity, and provision of content that people want. Media managers choosing to use these new technologies must be clear-headed in their decisions and pursue well-founded strategies or they will be lost in the maze of competing and alternative opportunities.