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Practitioners of the journalistic profession are, by nature, very curious. Consumers of that craft are expected to be equally curious and ready to engage with a complete telling. Some of this may yet be true but the message from the Twitteratti is less is everything.
News providers have, with economic incentive, re-educated journalists for embracing younger readers, listeners and viewers. Youthful attention deficit is no longer considered an affliction cured by maturity. It’s a lifestyle. Be brief.
When the Apple Watch makes its historic debut later this month - after an historic promotional blitz - the acquiring public will be able to keep up one sentence at a time with a news app from the New York Times. It will be “a new form of storytelling to help readers catch up in seconds,” said the NYT announcement posted to its website (March 31). The one-liners will be original journalism, it said, not just condensations from previously written material. (See more about online news here)
The NYT app will fix attention with photos (very tiny) and emojis (cute little pictograms). The Apple Handoff feature will allow folks to cache the story to a slightly bigger format on iPhones and iPads. There is also a breaking news feature, perhaps sending electroshocks or beams of light. The NYT is not alone in attaching itself to Apple’s hot new device; TV news channel CNN and US public radio network NPR are offering similar apps.
Find a parade and claim it, as Walt Disney once said.
Short-form news of a slightly more traditional form is being offered by BBC World Service, primarily to radio broadcasters in Asia and Africa. The BBC Minute is a full 60 seconds of the world’s most important news, updated twice a hour. It’s also available via iTunes, also an Apple product.
“We’re providing a lively, bite-sized summary of the day’s global news for younger audiences,” said BBC World Service English controller Mary Hockaday in the presser (April 1). “We’re always looking for new ways to reach new audiences.” (See BBC WS presser here) BBC News already provides abbreviated newscasts to domestic UK radio channel Radio 1.
A Twitter-tide reported the star-studded re-launch of streaming music service Tidal arriving by video ad featuring a dozen pop luminaries. Tidal is different from Spotify and all the others; “the first ever artist-owned global music and entertainment platform,” said pop star and anointed spokesperson Alicia Keys, quoted by Forbes (March 30). Rapper and big-bad-bidnes dude Jay Z, known to his momma as Shawn Carter, acquired through Project Panther Bidco 95% of Swedish tech company Aspiro, owner of music streamers Tidal and WiMP, about a month ago for US$54 million.
Jay Z is allowing other elite pop stars to be owners of Tidal, specifics unclear. The service will be premium quality and premium price with the pop star owners taking a bigger cut of the revenue stream. Currently Tidal has about a half million subscribers compared to 15 million for Spotify and untold millions spread around dozens of competing streaming music services.
Perhaps star-power will be a draw. It certainly attracted speculators to the 5% of Aspiro still floating on the Stockholm exchange. The share price was bid up nearly 1000%, reported Reuters (March 31), before trading was halted. Some folks will be sorely disappointed as the buy-back price is fixed and Aspiro will be de-listed at the end of this week.
Complaining about the cut of royalty distribution has been heard from the music business, from stars and supporting cast to accountants and agents, forever. Collective bargaining for radio rights always led to bigger fees for broadcasters. The digital age, ideally to benefit all, led to the great iTunes war, won by Steve Jobs. Retail purchase of music - and video - has fallen, though, in favor of streaming and now it’s a fight to get bigger piece of that revenue.
“Right now they’re writing the story for us,” said Jay Z, referring, presumably, to any business sector not sharing appropriately. “We need to write the story for ourselves.”
Parallels with other parts of the digital economy are unmistakable. Dreams of a digital dividend drove writers and journalists, videographers and poets to the web by the hundreds of thousands. Remember citizen journalism? Blogs are vanishing, even good ones, note the recent closing of techie GigaOM. So now Tidal will compete - at about US$250 per year - not only with Spotify but Netflix and whatever else comes along.
Journalism and violence are suffered together. Counts of media workers kidnapped, tortured, maimed or killed only rise. Targeting those who report from the world’s battlegrounds is just another tactic. Words and pictures are fought over by warlords, dictators and gangsters and any other objective.
“The single most treacherous threat to journalists is killing with impunity,” said Associated Press (AP) CEO Gary Pruitt to the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club, quoted by pointer.org (March 30). Killing or kidnapping a journalist should be prosecuted as a war crime, he said. “Impunity for those who kill journalists only empowers them.”
“It used to be that when media wore ‘press’ emblazoned on their vest… it gave them a degree of protection. But guess what: That labeling now is more likely to make them a target.” Four AP media workers were killed in conflict zones in 2014.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) was established by the Rome Statutes in 2002 for the prosecution to internationally accepted legal standards of war crimes and crimes against humanity set out in the Hague Conventions and Geneva Conventions.
Afghanistan’s Supreme Court last week sentenced a police officer to 20 years in prison for the murder of AP photojournalist Anja Niedringhaus. The sentence could be reduced, noted the court, reported Deutsche Welle (March 27), for "good behavior." The first trial judge sentenced him to death.
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