Those were the days

Is the web a parasite?

Liverpool: City of culture clash

Take thousands of well-heeled visitors from around the world and invite them to an event in a deprived inner city area. 

Have them queue for two hours in a line that snakes up and down abandoned streets of boarded-up houses.

That's the view of itself that Liverpool- 2008 City of Culture - gave to the world last night. 

Of the 35,000 who patiently shuffled their way towards Anfield for the Liverpool Sound concert starring Paul McCartney, many were from America, Japan, Australia and Europe.

The City of Culture tag was something Liverpool hoped would sell it to the world. The McCartney concert was it's best hope of doing that. The Scousers in the queue were embarrassed. It wasn't like this on match days, they said. The houses were boarded up because Liverpool FC was snapping them up and plans to build a new stadium on the site.

Meanwhile, the world saw a city that reeked of decay. That's probably not an accurate impression - but there was nothing to counter it. Nor was there any mention during the concert of other things visitors might like to do while they were in Liverpool, either within the Culture agenda or away from it. 

Even in the 08 information office in Whitechapel, the focus was on selling T-shirts rather than explaining that you might have come for Macca but that you could stay - or return - for more. If you wanted advice on how to tour the city's rich array of pubs, for example, you'd have to buy a £9 book. What you needed was a free leaflet. 

McCartney himself was superb. He gave a wonderful performance, full of love and nostalgia for the city that made him. The one boo of the evening came from Scousers when the city council was mentioned. They know who done good and who done them down. 

But for visitors, there is only one conclusion: Liverpool, you blew it.

The big boys should cry

Traditional broadcasting has taken a knock, with the results of a survey that shows viewers are more loyal to individual programmes than they are to channels.

They also express frustration with having to watch programmes when they are scheduled, commercial breaks, and the inability to rewind. One in three respondents got round this by watching TV programmes on something other than a trad TV set.

Quoted in The Guardian, David Wolf of Accenture, which conducted the survey, said television was rapidly shifting from its origins as a "clearly identifiable stand-alone medium".

"People are experiencing new consumption opportunities and moving away from traditional, linear programming," he said. "Today's youth are more dissatisfied with the traditional television experience and increasingly excited by the availability of new choices."

Just as with other media - from music to newspapers - content, and the kings of content, are the new masters.

If the Facebook fits...

I was working with some French journalists today, and happened to show them the front page of The Telegraph with the pictures, lifted in part from their Facebook pages, of some of the gap-year victims of the bus crash in Ecuador.

They were appalled. "In France," they said, "we could never publish this."

I'd actually been intending to show them something entirely unrelated, so was caught off guard. Of course, I gave the standard British defence of using such pictures. But afterwards, I did wonder.

I wondered in part whether we can justify using images that the photographers and subjects intended to be shared purely among friends. Yes, I know all the arguments we can use to explain why we should, I'm just not sure I believe them any more. And I wonder how many of our readers believe them.

A death has been announced

Actually it hasn't quite been announced, but we can predict it.

The ISPs are miffed at the amount of bandwidth the BBC's i-player is taking up.

The success of this application means that the death of live television is here. In future, most TV content will actually be web-delivered.

Of course, we can still expect live TV to premiere big productions but, apart from the major programmes, most TV will be watched on demand - as and when the audience decides it would like to see it.

Infact, the whole idea of watching or listening to something when the broadcaster decides we should already feels alien. Many of us watch or listen to TV and radio when we have the time.

When do I listen to Radio 4?

When I'm running.

What do I listen to?

The three programmes I like.

Thank God I no longer need to listen to what is presented to me. No more You and Yours, no more Woman's Hour. No more - thank you Jesus - Veg Talk.

And really, when you think about it, the idea that we can only listen to what is being presented at that moment is a very odd one- one that the internet has killed stone dead.

What Coldplay can teach the media star

The music industry is a little further on in the digital revolution than the press.

In the music industry, the major labels' struggles to stay profitable, and relevant, are more desperate than those in the newspaper industry.

Some of their major stars are deciding that they don't need the publishing and promotion services of the label.

Many labels are deciding they can't support acts that don't bring home the bacon.

Many acts are deciding that the MySpace/YouTube route to a public is the one for them.

Consumers, who used to shell out for physical products, are much less willing to do so. Increasingly, they buy (or otherwise acquire) a track or two electronically.

Even performers who have been selling millions of CDs - and some who continue to do so - are questioning whether music can be sold at all.

We don't know how all this is going to shake down yet, but we do know that things are becoming more granular.

Individual tracks by individual artists come to individual listeners' attention through the web. Those listeners browse around, pick up recommendations from others, get passed clips that online friends think they might like, and develop their own, often idiosyncratic webs of consumption.

Has all of this any relevance at all to the humble - or not so humble - hack?

I ask because I found myself recently talking to a room of writers who - in newspaper terms - are the equivalent of the big acts on EMI or any of the others now-shaky monoliths of the music industry.

Although it didn't seem to have occurred to most of them, their relationships with their publishers could be undergoing a sea change.

Let's start from the consumer end. Consumers of news, opinion, analysis, comment and debate are also beginning to take a much more granular approach to that consumption.

Where once most readers had a daily newspaper that provided their main source of news and comment now - online - they can pick and choose from the full range of available publications as widely and as often as they like.

Most publications have a handful of big names - their Coldplays and Madonnas - whose names sell many copies of that newspaper or magazine.

Ask any loyal reader why they buy a publication and they'll usually tell you that, apart from liking the general politics, tone, image etc of it, they love to read X or Y or Z.

Now they can have X,Y and Z without buying the physical product, and also browse around all the other letters of the star-writer alphabet, irrespective of where they are published - and for free.


My room full of Coldplays and Madonnas - I can't tell you their names because we were under the Chatham House rule - were unconvinced. They could not envisage a time when they would not need their publisher to pay them, distribute them and give them a platform.

But then an editor present mentioned a big star who wasn't there and who is creating their own website, independent of their trad media publisher.

This person is easily better known than the paper he writes for. The assembled print celebs were quick to point out that there was one rule for megastars, another for mere stars like them.

So maybe only the really big stars can break loose from their labels?

What it comes down to is money. The writers want paying. The newspapers have the deep pockets. I've blogged before on the subject of a payment system that might possibly square this particular circle, so I won't go over that again now.

Instead I'll concentrate on the question of a publishing platform, which was the reason all those stars had been brought together.

Alternative ways of finding the stars are being developed all the time. Almost any blog offers such a platform, with its links to people the writer thinks his or her readers would be interested in.

Some platforms - such as Arts and Letters - are very good at linking to a wide range of writers that its audience may not have heard of but who they will find interesting. It also provides a one-stop-shop for those looking for opinion and comment of a particular kind. The audience knows that they can keep tabs on several dozen prominent writers who are published in a score of different trad media outlets, by coming to this one place.

Such aggregating sites perform a valuable service in bypassing the online versions of trad media and gathering writing of a particular kind under one roof.

All the reader needs to do is find the roof that is right for them

And that strikes me as the alternative publishing platform that will work in future for the many stars and less-than-stars who currently can't eat without a media mogul's path to market.

I was struck by a comment on Mindy McAdams's blog about why newspapers still have a future. She was quoting a retiring journalism professor who said: "The hunter-gatherer model of journalism is no longer sufficient. Citizens can do their own hunting and gathering on the Internet. What they need is somebody to add value to that information by processing it — digesting it, organizing it, making it usable."

That's what the new breed of online, aggregating publishers are beginning to do.

Now, if I was sitting in a big leather chair in a multinational media company, I'd see if I couldn't do it too - only better. It's a bit like Sainsbury's getting into farmers markets.