Rather struck this week by Richard Sambrook’s announcement that he’s joining Edelman, the PR firm, following his departure from the BBC. You can imagine the rolling eyes among the old-school hacks at the prospect of such a respected journalism figure joining the dark side, and there are a couple of comments to that effect under Richard’s post. For many journalists, the dividing line between PR and newsmaking has always been and will always be deep and wide and tall.

But when someone as smart and intellectually curious as Richard makes a move like this, you have to dig a little deeper. It seems obvious to all of us now that connected media is transforming journalism, turning it, as Jeff Jarvis says, from a product into a process. But in fact journalism has always been a process, and PR has always been a process as well. And it’s in the history of these processes that the perceived gulf between them has opened up.

When the vehicle for eyeballs was print, with its inbuilt limitations of space, journalists and advertising sales teams were the gatekeepers for user attention. Commercial interests that wanted attention had two options: buy advertising from the sales teams (where the quality of the attention being bought was reflected in the price of the ad); or get their messages into news stories. Journalists meanwhile had something of a monopoly on user attention, and saw themselves as providing something unique, socially essential and in some senses holy. People bought newspapers because of the journalism, they argued, so therefore the sanctity of the journalism should be preserved at all costs (though it turns out, as we now know, that peoples’ reasons for buying newspapers were rather more nuanced and complicated than that).

So immediately journalists and PRs found themselves locked into a transactional process where “market value” was reflected by the quality (and uniqueness) of the information being traded. Journalists thrived on exclusivity, because that’s how they gained both attention and also self-worth: if they broke a unique story, they were professionally validated.

PRs sometimes thrived on exclusivity (when the story was big enough), but normally craved ubiquity, because that meant more eyeballs. Journalists saw themselves as gatekeepers and purveyors of truth; PRs saw journalists as opportunities and as obstacles. No wonder they rarely got on.

But now we find ourselves in a world where anyone has access to eyeballs at any time. The playing field has been levelled. Anyone with something interesting to say can get it into the public forum, as the politicians are beginning to discover. But once it’s out there, a new set of skills is needed to get significant attention to it. These are communication skills, and they include such things as optimising for search, incorporating reader input and responding quickly to new information.

That is the new process, and journalists and PRs suddenly find they don’t need each other in quite the same way as before. They’re both embarking on discovering how these new communications techniques can work in their favour; they’re both immersed in the process. That’s why journalists-as-communicators may find themselves increasingly attracted to PR firms, because what those firms offer is just another toolkit for getting attention.

A question, though: what type of person might go the other way?

Oh, Joy – Friends of Irony.

Luke Johnson, in the Guardian:

In my first interview to be the chairman of Channel 4, the panel asked me what I thought of public service broadcasting. Obviously I had no idea what they meant, so I waffled and got away with it.

So that’s all right then.

Very interesting point made in a generally very interesting Economist article: the decline of local news is contributing to Britain’s panic over crime:

Yet Britons refuse to do the same, and for this their newspapers, which seldom look on the sunny side of life, are much to blame. “NAME THE DEVIL BOYS—WE MUST NOT LET THEM HIDE”, roared the Mail on Sunday on January 24th, quoting the parents of the Edlington victims. Newspapers were no less lurid a century ago. But there is one big change: a shift in readership from local papers to national ones. Mr Cameron’s comfortable Witney constituents are dropping the Oxford Mail in favour of national titles or the television, which report the most gruesome stories from across the country, not just the county. In this way local crises, such as an outbreak of teenage stabbings in London in 2007 and 2008, become national panics, causing fear even in regions where the problem does not exist. And bad news travels best: the fact that London’s teenage-murder rate quietly halved last year was not widely reported outside the capital.

via Britain’s “broken society”: Through a glass darkly | The Economist.

Data Underload #7 – No Worries | FlowingData.

I would very much concur with this. Although would like to see some values on that x-axis. When does the downward slope start?

You can’t make a living selling classical recordings in America (which presumably means anywhere):

A leaked copy of the SoundScan figures for a single week from the fall tells an equally sad tale. In early October, pianist Murray Perahia’s much-praised album of Bach partitas was in its sixth week on the list, holding strong at No. 10. It sold 189 copies. No. 25, the debut of the young violinist Caroline Goulding, in its third week, sold 75 copies.

via Classical artists such as Hilary Hahn chart big on Billboard with little sales – washingtonpost.com.

Which begs the question: how many records are being sold in the mainstream charts? Classical music represents 3% of recorded music sales. So if you can get to No.10 with 189 sales in America in classical, can you get to No. 10 with (189/3)*100, or 6,300 sales?

Some consumers have objected that e-books must be cheaper to make than ink-on-paper books. A simple cost breakdown by Money magazine last year, however, suggested that only about 10 percent of a book's list price goes to printing. But ink-on-paper books have to be shipped, stored, and (when they go unsold) returned, and e-books would be spared these costs, too, as this analysis suggests. Also, according to TBI Research, because e-books are likely to end up with a lower list price after the dust clears, author royalties, calculated as a percentage of the list price, are likely to be lower, too—additional savings! Yay! When all these savings are added up, do you succeed in dropping a list price of $28 to one of $9.95? That’s a big drop. Profit margins at book publishers now are rumored to be no more than 10 percent, where they exist at all. It may not be possible for a single company to publish e-books at that price and also retain the infrastructure necessary to publish ink-on-paper books.

via Clash of the titans – Steamboats Are Ruining Everything.

(Here’s a message from Merlin, the charity for which I am a Trustee, and which is doing sterling, amazing, brilliant work on the ground in Haiti).

The Haiti earthquake has, as you will be aware,  generated a ground swell of support from every corner of society.   Six British artists and Giles Baker-Smith of GBS Fine Art have come together to donate six fantastic pieces to raise funds for Merlin’s work in Haiti. With five pieces available for individuals, this unique online fundraising appeal and prize draw, limited to 100 tickets, provides you with a 1 in 20 chance of winning a piece of art.  And for corporations we have one larger installation, which would sit well in a corporate setting.  Tickets for this piece are £500, with only 20 tickets available.  All the pieces, valued between £1,500 and £6,500, are on offer today, so please read on for details of how to enter the prize draw and make your donation to Merlin’s emergency response in Haiti.  Both draws are a great opportunity to support the Haiti Appeal and have the chance of winning some great art! Do pass this on to anyone who may be interested.

For Individuals: To enter the prize draw click this dedicated link and make a minimum recommended donation of £100*

For Corporates: To purchase one of only 20 tickets click here and enter today.

The artists in question are: Sean Fairman, who has provided the corporate piece; Emily Allchurch; Veronica Bailey (and in relation to her piece, by kind donation of Coutts & Co); Susannah Baker-Smith; and Robert Davies.  Merlin extends a huge thank you to these artists and to Giles Baker-Smith who initiated this appeal.

More information on the Art for Haiti Appeal can be found here and further details on the artists and the specifications of the pieces can be found here at www.gbsfineart.com

For more information on Merlin’s work in Haiti please visit: www.merlin.org.uk

YouTube – ICI Fibres – 1970s Clothes Commercial.

Using Foursquare or Gowalla represents such a minimal amount of effort and energy – normally in a moment of your day when you’re not doing anything else – that you only need a tiny amount of reward for it to be worthwhile. And, actually, for quite a lot of people, quite a lot of the point is in seeing how much point there is.

via russell davies: lowering the point point.

Recent research from ResearchICTAfrica reveals that Kenyans are spending incredible amounts on mobile communication as a proportion of income. Here’s how it breaks down. The average Kenyan spends over 50% of their disposable income on mobile communication. For the bottom 75% of the population, that figure goes up to 63.6%. In terms of total individual income, the average Kenyan spends 16.7% of their income on mobile communication. That figure rises to 26.6% when looking at the bottom 75% of the population. These figures are astounding. It highlights the fact that Africans are paying for mobile communication in spite of how expensive it is, not because of how affordable it is.

via Mobile Operators, Price Gouging, Innovation, and Txteagle — A Critique by Steve Song | MobileActive.org.

Go and indulge yourself in the Internet equivalent of apple pie and cream: a complete, internally consistent but externally insane analysis of what Kubrick’s The Shining is really about:

The truth is that The Shining is the story of how Stanley Kubrick cut a deal with the U.S. Government to fake the Apollo moon landings.

It is also the story of how Kubrick may have accidentally told someone what he had done and how that person had to be killed.

The Shining is also the story of how faking the Apollo moon landings almost sacrificed his relationship with his wife.

Finally it is the story of how Stanley Kubrick barely escaped alive to create another day.

The Shining is the story of how a part of Stanley Kubrick was killed by the agreement that he made with the U. S. government to become the “caretaker” of The Project called A11 or Apollo 11.

It is also the story of the history of NASA.

This explains why the previous “caretaker” was so pressured and stressed that he had to kill his TWIN daughters.

Why?

Because the previous NASA missions before Apollo were named Gemini!

via Jay Weidner (and initially via Metafilter and LinkMachineGo).

The thing I really loved about it is that the assumption of meaning in every symbol and the worship of allusion would not be out of place in some of the English literature texts I read at uni. They’re full of crap like the stuff in this essay. “If x means y, then we can assume that y means z, and Eliot is actually talking about bullfighting.”

From the always excellent  Strange Maps, this satirical 1940 map of Ireland designed to show the place in as grim a light as possible to discourage possible invaders. I’m wondering if a similar thing might be done about certain corporations to prevent people from wanting to work at them….

440 – Dissuasive Cartography: the Emerald Desert « Strange Maps.

They’re giving people too much about not enough and charging too much for it.

via And Another Thing: Can the heavyweight press get a bit less heavy, please?.

I shall be returning to this problem some day.

I’ve been thinking about this as the opening shots are fired in what is clearly going to be the first Twitter election, where any issue that can’t be boiled down to 140 characters won’t play. 140 characters is enough room for a slogan or a meretricious appeal; it’s not enough to say anything more useful. In that sense Stalin would have loved it. Lincoln not so much.

via And Another Thing: I’m dreading the first Twitter election.

YouTube – Josh Freese Presents: “Drumming Live with Nine Inch Nails-Wish”.

The Net as a medium is not for anything in particular — not for making calls, sending videos, etc. It also works at every scale, from one to one to many to many. This makes it highly unusual as a medium. In fact, we generally don’t treat it as a medium but as a world, rich with connections, persistent, and social. Because everything we encounter in this world is something that we as humans made (albeit sometimes indirectly), it feels like it’s ours. Obviously it’s not ours in the property sense. Rather, it’s ours in the way that our government is ours and our culture is ours. There aren’t too many other things that are ours in that way.

via Joho the Blog » The opposite of “open” is “theirs”.

# Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind peo­ple that you exist.

# Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the con­tent you pro­duce that’s as inter­est­ing in two months (or two years?) as it is today. It’s what peo­ple dis­cover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, build­ing fans over time.

via Stock and flow « Snarkmarket.

And yet somehow, at some point during the summer of 2009, I started cranking out more and more ambitious code. My PHP efforts went beyond straightforward HTML templates with WordPress tags dropped in. I wasn’t scared to look at javascript. Next thing I know, I’m writing WordPress plugins and pretty advanced javascript/Ajax routines. I’m scraping web pages in their thousands, to get data in the form I want. All stuff I knew was possible, and probably understood on a superficial level – but here I am, doing it. Dammit. So how on earth did I get here?

via Puffbox.com » Archive » 2009: the year I became a developer (sort of).

In this piece on Google in 2010, Cringely says something lovely:

Taking a guess about what’s happening there I predict that HTC warned Google about the radio problem but there were so many IQ points jetting around the conference room at Google that nobody bothered to actually listen they were so much in love with each other

via I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Google 2010: What Makes the Muskrat Guard His Musk? – Cringely on technology.

UPDATE:  Cringely’s on a roll. In another 2010 predictions post, he proposes outsourcing tracking of illegal aliens to the credit agencies and tells an extraordinary tale about how Homeland Security reacted to his famous column on social security numbers (which I can’t find a link to, but he quotes the relevant bit in this latest post). Read it, it’s essential.