Tonight I briefly tuned in to Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN and quickly changed it away — the Iowa caucus was the story of the day, and I started hating on the candidates onscreen within seconds. Like Mary J. Blige, I too do not need no hateration, so off to hockey I went. I’ve also pre-emptively decided to avoid as much political TV as possible this year, possibly even the debates, in favor of reading about everything via digital media. Political TV, even mostly impartial news, just infuriates me in a way the Internet doesn’t. Why?
I’ve pinned it down to the fact that TV takes away the emphasis on idea exchange by adding in the visual element. If I’m making judgments about some proposed initiative that matters to me, I don’t want any of a number of talking heads all up on my screen trying to force me into thinking one way or another. Let me read what I want and process it rather than adding in the specific face I’ll end up wanting to punch — that just clouds my judgment. This argument isn’t to pretend that the Internet isn’t full of blathering, shouting morons, because any comments section is almost instantly infected by their vitriol and mistyped ooze. But when the most in-your-face communication these screamers can use is to type in all caps, it really doesn’t take much to brush past the bullshit online.
I’ll make the counterintuitive case that the Internet actually makes us more rational towards the issues than we were in the TV era — sure, it’s easy to fall into an echo chamber almost anywhere online, but how many people now are at least using some semblance of “facts” instead of who has better hair? Keep your face out of my face, and we all benefit.
All around me are declarations of the upcoming NYT paywall as either a “fraught” decision that “won’t work” or a “big hedge” that, if it works, professional gruff and former coworker Jack Shafer will be “happy to call a success”.
I will see Jack and raise him a note of optimism, because despite being one of the cheapest digital bastards around — and I work each day strategizing how to turn people into the opposite of me, which would make me my own toughest target — I plan to drop some cash on the Times this time around.
The arguments against the paywall all make sense:
- People will steal the article content and post it elsewhere! True!
- People will delete their NYT cookies and use other tech workarounds to get more than 20 articles for free! Absolutely!
- The pricing is horrible and confusing! Word!
- Potential readers will hit the paywall and bail to free news sources! Many of them will!
But there are several factors that work in favor of the Times with this approach, unlike their previous TimesSelect fail:
- It’s not just opinion like TimesSelect. As the saying goes, opinions are like assholes and all that. There are almost 7 billion people on this Earth who can digest information and come up with something to say about it, so I’m thinking that just about defines the idea of a commodity’s price approaching zero. The Times columnist page is prestigious, but where they really hit their core competency (to use douchey MBA language) is in the ground-level creation of news as the paper of record. (And yes, they’ve had mixed performance in the past decade in living up to that, but the brand is still there.) Everyone can read a Times article and react to it, but it’s damn hard work to go out there and generate that article in the first place, and the NYT is the dream job for those ground-level reporters who are able to do that. Like them or hate them, the NYT is the established brand for news for millions, and unlike a lot of other substitutes, it’s worth $15 per month to me keep reflexively reading the Times.
And to promote the idea of the NYT as a high-quality, go-to island amidst a sea of information, I’ll also take this chance to bash the idea of citizen journalism. I recently partook in an instance of citizen journalism when I listened to an interview with Eric Avery on why he (again) left my favorite band, Jane’s Addiction. (The essence is that Perry Farrell is a self-glorifying dick, so not exactly something out of nowhere.) The interviewer from the forum gets big props for scoring this chat with the guy I consider the driving force of the band, but he put up an unedited video that is 16 segments long. That comes out to almost three hours — I love Jane’s and all, but amateur content producers should understand that editing can be OK!
- Demographics. This hasn’t changed since TimesSelect, so perhaps I’m more aware of it because I now fit it better, but the Times‘s readership is high-income, generally more than 25 years old and educated. The huge majority are not music pirates who are going to pull the content and share it illegally under a “screw the man!” posture. The sense of entitlement is dead in most people once they reach 25 — or at least I very much hope that it is.
A lot of digitally savvy folks tend to forget that they’re a tiny minority, and not everyone is like them — I would bet that your average Times reader is a lot more willing to pay $15 per month than to figure out how to alter their privacy settings and eliminate the necessary cookies, particularly once the arms race begins between the Times developers and those very few readers who do pursue workarounds.
- Graduated pricing. When someone links to an article behind a paywall and I’m not prepared to hit that paywall, I usually get pissed. But when that happens 20 times in a month and I’m suddenly reminded, “Hey, you know you’ve done this a lot, maybe you might consider an end to your damn freeloading,” I’ll be more likely to pony up. Sure, the pricing is complicated and annoying right now, but the system hasn’t even rolled out yet and so there’s been no chance for course correction. Besides, soaking the best customers works for drug dealers, and plenty of us are information junkies.
- Social links are still free. Based on my past digital-news jobs, I’m sure the NYT sees huge traffic spikes whenever it posts a story that gets people talking, and the Times tends to do this more than most. These days, that means Facebook and Twitter posts, and they were smart not to cut off this source of new readers. But if you like the site enough to read it 19 times in a month and still be willing to click for more? I’d wager you could be persuaded to pay.
If you traced my digital news consumption starting in college, it would consist of a small diet of initially web-friendly content producers, then a feast on way too many RSS feeds, then a move back to a focused group of content sites that do the best job of offering up clarity and intelligent insight that I can consistently access. My willingness to pay (hi, Prof. Ahuja!) is not infinite, but for the sites that I use the most, it’s there. I can count the Times among them, and I know there are millions like me, no matter how much tech-elite scoffing goes on.
As a former news guy, I really hope this works — but there’s also hard logic to think it will.
Not too long ago, I was admittedly indifferent to this mobile thing, even as a professional digital dude. This was because:
- I had BlackBerrys for work and found them useful but nothing revolutionary;
- I mistakenly chalked the iPhone hype up to characteristic Apple-fan hyperventilation;
- I stuck to my old clamshell phone because I’m really cheap.
Now that I’ve jumped to an Android smartphone, this HTC Incredible is practically grafted onto my hand. Why? It’s the dope applications. My friend Ben recently got one and asked me which ones to load up on his phone, so to spread the love around, I went with 16 of my favorites here to fill up your home screen. So load up your Android phone with these mugs — all of them free — and you’ll be set:
Gmail: Awesome job replicating the web experience. I also like using this app separate from the main mail app to keep my work / personal email divide simple.
Twitter: They hooked up their Android app. The HTC Peep app is kind of weak, and the native Android Twitter client does a cool job of syncing with your contacts, but this thing is well done. Each new release updates the functionality nicely, including a pretty well-done widget.
Yelp: No need for Google Maps when you hook this app up – finds local stuff based on your location, and the ratings make it easy to narrow down which one you want to try. It’s weird now to think of city life without Yelp – nice work, Eric.
Dolphin HD: It took three Android browsers before I settled on this one. The native Android browser is displays Flash and has good graphical capabilities, but it’s slow; Opera Mini is fast but can’t do Flash and isn’t great for images or fonts; but Dolphin HD is just right. I also like the gesture interface.
NPR News: You get the major news without headline overload in an easy-to-read text format, plus hourly audio news summaries and easy audio download for other pieces. Haters can hate, but I give props to NPR as a rare non-hyperbolic news outlet.
BBC News: With this and NPR, apparently I’m a sucker for taxpayer-funded news, but I reach for this app when I want to remember that there’s a world of news outside the United States. Thanks, hyperbolic news cycle.
Chicago Tribune: Finally, a news outlet that can stay afloat without government money. (Wait … nevermind.) This app is apparently still in beta, but I love it. I’ve been looking for a solid Chicago-centric app for my phone, and this one nails it – breaking headlines, further in-depth local news from the paper, the Opinion section that I now read a lot more often (even as John Kass’ political nicknames irk me) and handy weather on the app homepage.
The Weather Channel: Loads better than the crappy HTC weather app that comes loaded with the phone, and stays in your status bar for a constant look at the temperature. Could use some cooler animation, but has all the info I need heading out the door.
BeyondPod: Tried several podcasting clients; this one’s easily the best.
ESPN Scorecenter: I should probably look beyond ESPN for potential sports-score apps, but when this one has everything I need and a super-intuitive interface, there’s no point in bothering.
Out of Milk: Solid shopping-list app, and I’ve tried several. You can scan barcodes, easily sort your items and cross them off with a single long press.
WordPress: For maintaining an entire site on a 3×5 screen, you can’t beat this one.
Facebook: Gets all your FB needs in a FB-branded package that looks exactly like you’d want the mobile-fied version of Facebook to look. I also like that the widget is just status updates — FB’s made it hard to find those anymore.
Chase: I mentioned these guys as a positive example for work recently, because in digital-consultant speak, they’ve got the multi-channel touchpoint optimization thing down. You can get the same banking done whether you’re at the teller, ATM, website or phone site/app, each one in a channel-friendly format. The deposit-by-photo thing doesn’t work that well, but it’s still a cool idea.
People: It’s a native app, but I love the automatic Facebook and Twitter syncing, the ease of importing contacts from Google, and the contact formatting. (Though why can’t I enter a letter and jump ahead when browsing the list?)
NY Times: I might read NPR, the Trib and the BBC more often than the NYT these days, but I can’t hate on these guys’ ability to be out in front of the news industry on almost every interactive count. This is an even better newsreading experience than nytimes.com on the PC.
Bonus 17th item: Angry Birds: The rest are all apps, so I’ll justify squeezing one more in because it’s an awesomely addictive game. You just can’t front on the blue splittable bird flying out of the slingshot.
Also-rans: Pandora, Google Translate, American Express, Tumblr, Astro, IMDB, Epicurious, Kayak.
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Comments (1)
Yo.
Back in my TIME.com days, I developed a serious music-at-work habit that kept on going all the way through Slate. Fortunately for me, my summer workplace at Kaplan Higher Ed is also cool with employees listening to headphones during the day, so I haven’t had to spend my time here sans face-melting shredfests.
Even more fortunate for me in the wake of my busted iPod, a coworker from Slate (props to Ellen) pointed me in the direction of Grooveshark, a startup music site that lets you search for any tune you want and stream it. It has similar functionality to Pandora, as you can click on a song and get a list of related songs, but with the instant playability there’s no need to wait to see what gets played next. Not only that, but mugs with a free profile can create and save playlists, mark songs as favorites, send out URLs for individual songs, and create exportable widgets like the one I have down below in the right column. (Though I’m a little disappointed at the lack of volume control on the individual-song widget. How are you supposed to go to 11?)
I’m hella confused as to how this site is allowed to exist, but Grooveshark’s DMCA-infringement policy and the fact that all of the music is uploaded by users would seem to put the legality onus on the general webgoing public. I can imagine record companies and Apple’s iTunes division wouldn’t think this is such a big deal right now because the songs aren’t downloadable to a hard drive or music player, but once everyone’s got high-quality web access on their cell phones and less of a need for hard copies of music files, record companies better check themselves before they wreck themselves. (That reminds me to go listen to that Das EFX song, particularly for Ice Cube’s ability to rhyme “knife, ho” with “rifle”.)
But for real, Grooveshark = mad good. Give it a visit.
Also, I updated some site CSS this weekend, so I wanted to point everyone to the style chooser up top. You get your choice of red, blue, green, black, or old-school viewing.
