Steve Ballmer, speaking at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival, said he doesn't see a recovery for the news industry after the recession:"I don't think we are in a recession, I think we have reset," he said. "A recession implies recovery [to pre-recession levels] and for planning purposes I don't think we will. We have reset and won't rebound and re-grow."So how will we get our news? "All … [Read more...]
Archives for June 2009
Power Curve: Four (Short) Stories About Empowering Audiences
A few years ago arts organizations had the bright idea that they should sell tickets online. Not wanting to invest much in the effort, they turned to the obvious ready-made ticket seller: Ticketmaster. It wasn't an encouraging experience. Orchestras reported mediocre online sales. It wasn't until a customized ticket-selling web application came online that online sales proved their worth. What was … [Read more...]
Bill Ivey Talks About Obama and the Arts and Whether America Should Have a Secretary of Culture
Bill Ivey was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts during the Clinton administration. More recently he has been director of the Curb Center at Vanderbilt University, and, after last year's presidential election, ran the Obama administration's transition team for culture. So what place will the arts have in the new administration? Ivey says the jury's still out. As for another big issue … [Read more...]
Will Technology Make Our Intellectual Property Laws Obsolete?
Interesting take on the future of copyright and patent law by Eric Reasons:Every business model relying on intellectual property law (patent and copyright) is heading for massive deflation in our lifetimes. We've seen it with the music industry and newspapers already. The software industry is starting to feel it with the maturity of open source software, and the migration of applications to the … [Read more...]
The Text Revolution – Why Text Is More Efficient Than TV
In the TV Age the tube has dominated breaking news. Watching crucial moments of a big dramatic story on TV can be compelling, and the TV news audience has dwarfed newspaper readership. It is accepted wisdom that TV owns the dramatic breaking story; newspapers bat cleanup.But maybe not. Watch a big story on cable news and you're in for acres of boring vamping and conjecture wrapped around the … [Read more...]
Is Working For Free A Threat Or An Opportunity?
Google has asked prominent illustrators if they'd like to create new skins for the company's Chrome browser. Here's the catch: Google isn't offering any money for the designs. Google expects artists to contribute for free. Understandably, many illustrators and artists are protesting; a rich company like Google can afford to pay, and asking people to work for free devalues the work.Stan Schroeder … [Read more...]
Money Back Guarantee – Can You Take The Risk Out Of Paying To See Art?
Richard Cahan had an idea. If theatres were worried about programming risky work because audiences might not shell out money to see it, and audiences were balking when it came to taking a chance on something new, why not just eliminate the risk?Cahan's a part-time program officer with the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation in Chicago, so he came up with a plan: the foundation would back a money-back … [Read more...]
Terms Of Endearment – How Does An Orchestra Spell Success?
How do good ideas take hold? It's not enough to talk about them; the context in which you talk about them has to be right. How do producers pitch ideas for movies? They relate them to other movies that have already been successful. So Terminator meets Cheaper by the Dozen gets you to Kindergarten Cop (don't ask). Bilbao Guggenheim gets you to a whole new generation of museum buildings as art. … [Read more...]
Is Yelp Replacing Arts Journalists?
Craigslist stole in and took the classified ad business away from newspapers while they weren't looking. The same thing seems to be happening to A&E reviews and listings with Yelp. Newspapers have been doing a worse and worse job of reviewing local performances. And most newspaper listings are not very good.Yelp is a community built around reviews. Yelp users review everything, and as its user … [Read more...]
When The Mob Turns Angry, What's A Museum To Do?
A week ago New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz launched a bomb on his Facebook page: "The Museum of Modern Art practices a form of gender-based apartheid. Of the 383 works currently installed on the 4th and 5th floors of the permanent collection, only 19 are by women; that's 4%. There are 135 different artists installed on these floors; only nine of them are women; that's 6%. MoMA is telling … [Read more...]
Of Rocket Science And Making Money On Journalism
Further to yesterday's post on how newspapers ought to expand their definition of news to make money comes this post by Steve Outing, suggesting such a strategy:The way for newspapers to charge for content is not rocket science. They must create new types of high-value, probably niche, content, communities, and/or services that are unique enough that people will be willing to pay for them. That's … [Read more...]
Maybe It's Time To Think Bigger?
So journalism has to change. Everyone gets that. But most new models I see are really traditional journalism gussied up in new tools. Or, they reinvent in such a way that throws away some traditional journalistic values. Most conceptual re-imagining of journalism is still tied to the events-of-the-hour sort. What happened today. Traditional journalism has been good at this kind of reporting, not … [Read more...]