Why we need the Washington Post, New York Times et al

We can easily afford to lose publishers like Gawker Media, but not papers like the Washington Post and the "failing" New York Times.

Donald Trump's choices to head the Energy and Interior departments and the Environmental Protection Agency are climate-change "skeptics" and they support and are supported by the oil industry. This has led some climate scientists to initiate projects to back up climate-sicence research and data.

The Washington Post published a well researched article on the concern of the climate scientists with links to many supporting articles. Donald Trump routinely denigrates the "mainstream media," but this article is a terrific example of what the press can and must do.

The Internet has disrupted the business model of newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times and the Trump administration poses another threat.

Peter Theil is a member of the Trump transition team and a very rich Silicon Valley investor. Gawker Media alienated him by publishing the fact that he was gayand Theil retaliated by secretly financing a law suit for Hulk Hogan who had also been embarrassed by Gawker. The suit bankrupted Gawker Media.

Donald Trump frequently threatens to sue adversaries. Can we imagine him or a supporter like Theil suing the Washington Post?

Maybe, maybe not, but he will surely continue using his "bully pulpit" for ad hominem attacks against publications that fact-check and criticize him. For example, consider these tweets about the "failing" New York Times:

Trump nicknames -- lying, little ... now failing Source

In 2013, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, purchasted the Washington Post from the Graham family for $250 million -- a lot of money for you and me, but not much for Donald Trump or Peter Theil.

Trump has has threatened Bezos, saying he has "a huge antitrust problem because he's controlling so much, Amazon is controlling so much of what they are doing." He added that Bezos is "using The Washington Post, which is peanuts, he's using that for political purposes to save Amazon in terms of taxes and in terms of antitrust."

The Internet has cost newspapers dearly and the Graham family might have been vulnerable to an attack by Trump if they had not sold it. At the time Bezos bought the Washington Post, there was a lot of speculation as to his motivation. I don't know why he bought it, but I am glad he did, because he can afford to defend it.

We can easily afford to lose publishers like Gawker Media, but not papers like the Washington Post and the "failing" New York Times.

Live streaming of football games and presidential debates, version 1.0

I would also be willing to pay for interaction -- perhaps asking a question or making a comment of my own.

There has been a lot of discussion of the appropriate role of moderators in the presidential debates -- should they challenge the debater's statements if they are false or simply ask questions and let the candidates challenge each other? That will become a moot point in the era of live-streaming on the Internet.

Twitter is streaming Thursday night football games -- you see the game as well as the stream of tweets. I reviewed the experience and concluded that there were too many commercials and that I wanted to be able to filter the tweets. I am not interested in the comments of a million football fans, but would like to be able to follow the live-stream comments of experts like a group of professional football players, sports writers, Las Vegas odds-makers, etc.

Now, let's apply that to the live streaming of a presidential debate. (Note that Twitter is streaming the debates).

There will be plenty of commentary in the tweet stream accompanying Twitter's video and the audience will fact-check the debaters regardless of what the moderator does. But, as in a football game, I don't want to see tweets from every partisan viewer, I want to see informed, factual commentary.

If I could watch the streaming comments of a relatively small group of experts along with the video stream, I would not care whether the moderator challenges the debater's statements or just reads questions and keeps the speakers on schedule. I would also be willing to pay for interaction -- perhaps asking a question or making a comment of my own.

The asynchronous Internet has changed political campaigns just as newspapers, radio and television did. Now we have a new medium -- live streaming over the Internet.

Early movies, like those shown below, were made by filming stage plays. Similarly, today's live coverage of football and presidential debates is just a starting point. Adding expert or crowd-sourced fact checking and commentary would only be a small variation on what Twitter has already done with football games. There will be more changes as the medium co-evolves along with our culture and education system.

Yahoo relies on annoying ads and specialized Websites

Will Internet news go the way of newspapers?

December 17 was the anniversary of President Obama's call for change in our Cuba policy. That milestone sparked a lot of coverage in the mainstream press, which I discussed in a post on my blog on the Cuban Internet.

The most extensive Cuba coverage I saw was a week-long series of posts on Yahoo -- U. S. and Cuba, One Year Later. The series has many well written posts on various aspects of Cuban culture and the political situation. Most are human interest stories on tourism, fashion, baseball, etc., but several were Internet-related.

The posts are not detailed or technical, but they are well written for a general audience -- like newspaper readers. (Remember newspapers)?

That is the good news.

The bad news is that the posts are overrun by annoying ads and auto-play videos. This is illustrated by the series "home page," shown below.

The series table of contents -- can you spot the ads?

Most of the elements in this array of phone-sized "cards" consist of an image from and link to a story on Cuba, but, if you look carefully, you will see that several of them link to sneaky ads. It's like Where's Waldo -- can you spot the ads?

In an earlier post, I suggested that advertising-based, algorithm-driven Internet news might be increasingly redundant and concentrated in high-volume sites. The advertising revenue is used to pay talented writers, photographers and videographers who are capable of producing timely news coverage of a story like this one.

But, people are fed up with those ads and increasingly deploying ad blockers.

Reasons people turn to ad blockers

People are circulating manifestos and Google and Facebook are proposing standards to improve the advertising and speed of the Web, but will those moves cut Yahoo's revenue?

Furthermore, mainstream media like Yahoo rely to some extent on specialized, "long tail" sources, like my Cuban Internet blog. Yahoo interviewed me (and many others) and took material from some of my posts in preparing their coverage. But, will specialized blogs and sites continue to exist? Losing focused sources would increase the cost of mainstream media stories.

I really liked Yahoo's coverage of Cuba one year later, but I wonder if they will be around for Cuba five years later.

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Update 12/27/2015

ASUS will include the AdBlock Plus ad blocker in their proprietary browser. Apple is now allowing ad blockers on iOS devices. Will Firefox be next? Microsoft Edge?

Britannica is gone -- Grolier struck the first blow

The New York Times announced that after 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.

Wow, I guess it was inevitable and it probably does not mean much to young folks today, but there was a time when every school and library and many middle class homes had copies of the Britannica.

I guess the handwriting was on the wall in the early 1980s, when Grolier, a less prestigous competitor, began offering subscirptions to a text version of their encylopedia through online services Compuserve, Dow Jones, and the New York Times Information Bank.

Grolier's next move was a CD-ROM version, which was developed by Gary Kildall, the creator of CP/M, the mainstream PC operating system before MS DOS. Here's a picture of Gary and the encyclopedia.

Kildall showed the encyclopedia at the 1985 Consumer Electronics Show and it went on sale the following year. The first edition was text only, with 9 million words and 30,000 entries. It was updated quarterly and pictures were added in 1990.

A CD-ROM was faster than Compuserve, but a CD-ROM drive was around $500 in those days. Philips offered a bundle of one of their CD-ROM drives and the encyclopedia. Grolier kept at it for a while, and Microsoft entered the market with their own multimedia CD-ROM encyclopedia, Encarta.

Neither of them was a blockbuster, and the Web and Wikipedia finished them off. (I have compiled a collection of Wikipedia evaluations, including a well-known comparison to Britannica that was published by Nature).

Now the Net has zapped Britannica too. It brings back nostalgic memories of Britannica set on my bookshelf and the time I was lucky to have spent with Gary Kildall back in those heady days of CP/M and CD-ROMs.

Who needs the broadcast television networks?

The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times both ran recent stories on entertainment programs being produced for the Internet by successful, mainline TV producers and writers. They are attracted to the new medium by creative control and cost savings on distribution. You can check episodes of two of them at The Fantastic Two and Qarterlife.

For more insight into the background of TV production and what is motivating these successful men to move their talents from television to the Internet, see the companion LA Times article Are Corporate Suits Ruining TV?". (You can guess the answer to that question).

Watch a couple episodes from one or both of these programs. How do they compare to TV? How do you think they could be improved?