Monetizing content, 1916 style

I found this quote in 1916 trade magazine for silent movie theater owners:
"The stories of 1916 are no better than the stories of 1716 nor of AD 1 nor will those of 2016 be any better. A prize offer of a million dollars would not bring forth a story better than thousands for which the authors received a skimped handful of shillings or francs or dollars or told for the mere love of telling a tale."
(The Moving Picture World, Aug. 5, 1915, p. 930)

In other words, good writers will write the same copy for $1 million or for $1 or for nothing (or maybe even pay for the privilege). That's something the Internet hasn't changed.

Leaving college behind

While listening to Steven Levy talk about his new book, "In the Plex" about Google, it struck me how many of the Net's innovators -- Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg -- dropped out of some level of college. I'm sure this question has been explored elsewhere, but I wonder what the fact that the true innovators of our era leave college says about higher education. It seems that now college is merely a place where bright people meet each other and go off to their personal laboratories to create. This goes to a theme that is affecting newspapers as well as education, that the means and substance of what we do has changed so significantly, that we don't actually communicate much of value anymore. We are in the midst of such a paradigm shift that no institution has yet caught up to a point that it can reliably educate on the basis of the current state.

A voice from the past

I was only 12 or 13 when I was first introduced to A Prairie Home Companion and its host, Garrison Keillor. A family friend, one of the most insightful, cerebral and (do I even have to say?) troubled people I have ever known had recently separated from his wife, and we visited him for Saturday dinner in an old house much to spacious for its bachelor occupant. When 6 p.m. rolled around, he turned on the radio already tuned to the NPR affiliate in Columbus, Ga., and out poured the musings of the second most insightful and cerebral person I have ever heard.

Garrison Keillor's show is of and for his home in rural Minnesota, but it resonates with everyone who has somewhere they call home. Keillor has done the improbable, resurrecting the genre of radio variety show with folksy monologues of Lake Wobegon's Norwegian bachelor farmers, folk singers, fiddlers and a sound effects guy doing bird calls with his mouth. It is an anachronism, as unlikely as a revival of Vaudeville or the Lawrence Welk Show, complete with tap dancers and champagne bubbles.

What makes Keillor's show so effective is its authenticity. Though the sponsors (Powder Milk Biscuits, “heaven's, they're tasty and expeditious!” and the Ketchup Advisory Board) are fake, the nostalgia is real. Garrison has a true affinity for the personalities of a world that only can exist in our memories, for songs that are only appealing in their simplicity and humor that tends to make us smile instead of laugh.

Like any personality-driven institution, from Mr. Rogers to Paul Harvey to Charles Schulz, you know that “A Prairie Home Companion” is destined to end when Keillor succumbs to our common adversaries, age and mortality. He has already announced a date for retirement, spring 2013, when he says he hopes to fade into the woodwork and hand off the microphone to an as-yet-unnamed replacement. But everyone knows that Lake Wobegon will fade like Brigadoon without him.

On Tuesday, Sept. 6, Keillor will bring a version of his show, currently on summer hiatus, to the Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth in what is called the Summer of Love tour. A few tickets remain. I will be there. And I will be reminded of my isolated, insightful, cerebral, troubled friend, alone is a house that is too big for him. Keillor's show is just like that, an isolated, insightful calming voice in a world that is too big and too busy for a place like Lake Wobegon to exist anymore.

Score one for the fontmeisters

This is a story to warm the hearts of copy editors everywhere. The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has changed their default font from arial to century gothic and said this will save money on ink when kids print out their emails. Who new a serifed font would save ink over sans-serif?

Ubiquity

When I was in college, I had to take a macroeconomics class. I can't remember if it was the prerequisite to a journalism degree or simply a degree, but I remember it was by turns excruiciatingly boring and intensely interesting. The dapper asst. professor told our class that economics was the science of satisfying unlimited wants with limited resources. For this effort, the free market was touted as the best system to fairly satisfy the most "wanters" reasonably. He drew a chart on the chalkboard (remember those?) where one line represented increasing price and another line represented decreasing demand. Invariably this chart formed and "X" and this nexus was where supply met demand. This was the solution to the problem of limited supply. But what he never explained is what happens when there is unlimited supply, or at least relatively unlimited supply.
This is the conundrum facing journalists today. The Internet represents a potential limitless source of news, and when that happens, people are willing to pay what some people are always willing to sell that info for: nothing.
And it seems that the Internet isn't the only place where relative ubiquity defeats the free market model. Remember all those "can you believe this?" stories about Farm Bills that paid farmers NOT to plant corn or bought milk from dairy farmers to pour it down the drain?
The fact is that in certain segments of agriculture, technology reached the point that, in many years, supply exceeds demand. Just ask any farmer and they can tell you a bumper crop is bad news.
That's what we have, a bumper crop of information. And just like agricultural goods, it varies in quality, but most people are just as satified with information of questionable value as they are with food of questionable nutritional content.
As technology progresses, this will expand to other commodities: If green technology succeeds this will happen with energy. It seems to have already happened in housing.
The odd outcome of ubiquity is that sometimes it leads to enforced shortage to prop up the free market paradigm. There are too many houses. Prices are falling. We must kick people out of their houses.
There is too much food. Prices are falling. We must dispose of perfectly good food and let some go hungry.
There is too much access to news. Profit is falling. We must wall off and charge for content.
Please don't call me a Communist, but when supply overwhelms demand, the free market doesn't work.
Just ask my Economics professor.

Who needs page designers?

Have you seen the newly redesigned, or perhaps I should say undesigned, Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Take a look and try to hold on to your lunch.
It looks like the editor's high school graduate nephew is laying it out. No depth. No clear story hierarchy. Nothing to catch the eye. It is a pointless collage of words, heads and a couple of generic pictures. Looks like the AJC is throwing in the towel on the print product. First it was copy editors who became expendable (who needs spelling, grammar and fact checking?) and now it's page designers (who needs news as an art form?) Would somebody cover this abortion with a white sheet?