Story Time

VOICE OVER: My whole life is about the story. When I'm not workin', I like to work. And when I'm not doin' that, I like to kick back with a book and a dame, in that order. So when I heard that the Mad Genius was coming up with new-fangled ways of telling stories, I got the wiggles. His real name's David Kirkpatrick. I found him holed up in an old factory in Plymouth, Mass. His office was all decked out with inspirational quotes on the walls. J.D. Salinger… Joni Mitchell… and a New York Times headline from an article about him.

Reporter Sean Cole looks into MIT's plans to team up with a new movie studio in Massachusetts to create the storytelling technology of the future.

All I want for Christmas is a transparent system of politics, and perhaps technology can help

Is it the case that government - and democracy - suffers because it it described by bureaucrats rather than it’s users? Is there a case that ‘Open Government’ would be better served by employing a trusted third-party mediator (with a ‘public service’ remit) and asking them to describe government for the rest of us?

From Local Democracy. Maybe technology can do it?


GuidoFish, anyone?

Another Way of Telling the Tech Story

From Stuff That Happens.

MIT & Storytelling

The Center for Future Storytelling will be co-directed by three Media Lab principal investigators: V. Michael Bove Jr., an expert in object-based media and interactive television; LG Associate Professor Cynthia Breazeal, a leader in the field of personal robots and human-robot interaction; and Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar, a pioneer in the development of new imaging, display and performance-capture technologies.

Kept forgetting to post this.

Memo to Newspapers: stop writing useless stories

From Publishing 2.0.

To do this, they [newspapers] have to practice innovation-by-omission. That is, they need to stop writing stories that don’t deserve to be written.

Newsrooms no longer have the luxury of wasting resources on non-stories...They no longer have the luxury, in an information-overload world, of wasting readers’ time with non-stories or information readers already know. Readers will simply go somewhere else.

Content: the third way, pretend you are 19

Or 14.

Then there’s the troublesome third argument, the one we know is true. This is the one that admits that the content that thrives in the new distribution-and-display systems is suspiciously different from the American popular culture we used to love even 10 years ago. Thrillers, it seems, don’t flourish on Hulu. No one is reading a six-part investigative series about mayoral malfeasance on Twitter. And if it’s the afterthought message boards — the ones moderated by interns — that draw all the traffic, why are we in old media pouring so much money and time into “main event” programming that goes unread and unviewed?

NYT on the content truth that dare not speak its name.

People who work in traditional media and entertainment ought either to concentrate on the antiquarian quality of their work, cultivating the exclusive audience of TV viewers or magazine readers that might pay for craftsmanship. Or they should imagine that they are 19 again: spending a day on Twitter or following a recipe from a Mark Bittman video played on a refrigerator that automatically senses what ingredients are missing and texts an order to the grocery store (it will soon exist!). Then they should think about what content suits these new modes of distribution and could evolve in tandem with them. For old-media types, mental flexibility could be the No. 1 happiness secret we have been missing.

Writers: pimp your story or else

...how to win? That, of course, is the billion-dollar question, and armies of people tackle it, every day: the dark art of manipulating Google's algorithms, otherwise known as search engine optimisation (SEO), has become a big business in the last 10 years. "A common way to get a lot of links very quickly is by getting people in India or somewhere to make them for you," says Paul Roach, the Guardian's head of SEO.

There are more aggressive, automated ways, too - scripting, using hijacked computers to add links to blogs, hacking messageboards - but these are referred to, in somewhat Disney-esque fashion, as "black hat" methods, and Google thoroughly disapproves: in fact, if you're caught using them, you're immediately banned. "We're what you call white hat," says Roach. "We follow Google's terms of service. Then again, we've got no reason not to - Google trusts the Guardian, so we generally do all right."

Blog will, as I said earlier in the week, eat itself.

"Now," says Karp, "everything is up for grabs", and every piece has to fight for attention on its own merits. It isn't enough just to publish it: you suddenly have this "whole idea of actually having to market the news - how do you get it emailed around? How do you get it on to Twitter, or Digg [a content-sharing site]? And whose responsibility is it to flog stories? The PR department? The editorial staff? It's what bloggers do - they're out there hustling, interacting with each other a lot. You actually have to engage in a more social dynamic." He compares old and new media to the difference between standing in front of a room and giving a speech, and going to a party: it isn't enough just to walk into a room - you have to get stuck in there, and start talking to people, and try to work out what they're interested in, and what they want to hear.

Timely Guardian. Read here.

Cinderella Can't Read

Ad campaign from Canada fighting illiteracy.

Perfect Recession Entertainment: talk

In New York City the trendy club to go to is The Moth where prominent people entertain a roomful of drinkers for fifteen minutes by speaking without notes.

You can see why this would appeal, particularly to middle-aged couples. Any band, other than one you are related to, is a terrible gamble for all but the professionally involved. The cinema seems exclusively aimed at teenagers. The theatre costs a fortune. You don't want to be shouted at by comics. Therefore why not go along to hear someone's interesting opinions or experiences elegantly expressed with the promise of a few jokes on the way? It seems like perfect recession entertainment.

David Hepworth from What's he on about now?.

Like it's 1899...

...

When asked about his perspective on social issues—gay marriage, abortion— [X] tapped his Bible and said, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough.’ ”

Close the shop, let's take a drive.

Rome: first the mini series, now the Google Remix

More here.

Tower of Babel is Back

The story of the Tower of Babel stands at the heart of how we imagine architecture. This myth hovers over every tall building; behind all criticism of skyscrapers lurks the spectre of Babel, smote for its hubris. It is a great myth but the British Museum's show reveals it is a true story.

Jonathan Jones on the new British Museum show.

Who is our Soul of the Age? AKA the Golden Triangle

From a review of Jonathan Bate's new Shakespeare book...

One could pleasurably read it as a collection of brief essays, in the freewheeling, interrogative sense of the word associated with the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, whose Essais were translated into richly flavoured prose by John Florio in 1603, and whose name crops up frequently in these pages because of his demonstrable influence on Shakespeare.

One of the benefits of this approach is that it permits a cheerful agnosticism where a more linear narrative would require a decisive act of faith. There are the 'lost years', for instance, of Shakespeare's mid-twenties – a period of unknown activity between 1585 (when his twins Hamnet and Judith were baptised in Stratford) and 1592 (when he is first recorded as an actor and dramatist in London). Was he a 'schoolmaster in the country', or a lawyer's clerk, or a fugitive from justice after a poaching incident on the estates of Sir Thomas Lucy – all of which were canvassed by early biographers? Or was he that mysterious player called Shakeshaft who is documented in a Catholic household in Lancashire?

Charles Nicholl on Jonathan Bate's new Shakespeare, ah, non-fiction.


Review of Nicholl's The Lodger here.


Review of reviewer's Shakespeare by...Jonathan Bate....


All's well that ends well.

The Story Begins to Change

Get ready for a fight in this country over the political narrative. The Government will argue that it has a new progressive left ally and that McCain, who visited the Tory conference, was defeated by the left. The Conservatives will argue that time for a change defeated it's no time for a novice.

Daniel Finkelstein in The Times.

Dream Inversion: the Trickle Up Effects

The rags-to-riches story—that staple of American biography—has over the years been given two very different interpretations. The nineteenth-century version stressed the value of compensating for disadvantage. If you wanted to end up on top, the thinking went, it was better to start at the bottom, because it was there that you learned the discipline and motivation essential for success. “New York merchants preferred to hire country boys, on the theory that they worked harder, and were more resolute, obedient, and cheerful than native New Yorkers,” Irvin G. Wyllie wrote in his 1954 study “The Self-Made Man in America.” Andrew Carnegie, whose personal history was the defining self-made-man narrative of the nineteenth century, insisted that there was an advantage to being “cradled, nursed and reared in the stimulating school of poverty.” According to Carnegie, “It is not from the sons of the millionaire or the noble that the world receives its teachers, its martyrs, its inventors, its statesmen, its poets, or even its men of affairs. It is from the cottage of the poor that all these spring.”

Today, that interpretation has been reversed. Success is seen as a matter of capitalizing on socioeconomic advantage, not compensating for disadvantage. The mechanisms of social mobility—scholarships, affirmative action, housing vouchers, Head Start—all involve attempts to convert the poor from chronic outsiders to insiders, to rescue them from what is assumed to be a hopeless state. Nowadays, we don’t learn from poverty, we escape from poverty...

Malcolm Gladwell on Goldman Sachs.

The Typographer's take on the campaign

Begins with Hilary's yellow pants suit, and ends with a prank call.

An Unidentified Narrative Object, Gomorrah, & The Hindu

The Hindu on the nature of the new narrative.

In the mid-19th century, an angry not-so-young man, wishing to write his “complete representation of reality” had been, in the words of biographer Francis Wheen, “pushing out beyond conventional prose into radical literary collage — juxtaposing voices and quotations from mythology and literature, from factory inspectors’ reports”, injecting his long, detailed narrative with hardboiled newspaper reports as well as using devilish metaphors (a favourite of mine from an earlier publication: “...all that is solid melts into air” to describe dislocation).

In a way, Gomorrah, with its contemporary descriptions of “capital [being] dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour” is the mini Das Kapital of our times. And to mistake Saviano’s masterpiece as just ‘journalism’ would be to mistake Marx’s tumultuous classic as simply ‘economic theory’. It might not be everything that’s fit to print. But that’s our problem of defining the ‘fitness’ of things.

Crosstrain traffic: journalists to now work 26 hour day shifts

There is a quote about peanuts and monkeys, I know there is, I just can't find it online today. Instead there's this where "ideas and people meet" and then - I'm guessing - instantly hate each other. Or make a Podcast.

Koten is stressing the need for reporters to get out of their protective silos and be more versatile. “If I’m a journalist, I need to be able to do online, print, video, audio - whatever the heck is out there. I wanted to start a super-reporter program here, where we took two reporters from digital, two reporters from Fast Company and two reporters from Inc. and have them cross-train like hell to create a super-reporter who could wear all nine hats. Then I thought: Why shouldn’t everybody be doing that?”

Please.


Enough silos.

Getting the retaliation in first, Lions style: more stories from politics before the end of mass media

My friends in the Partisan Press, your reputation has now fallen lower than both President Bush (25 percent) and the Democratic Congress (18 percent). Journalistic integrity now ranks along side communicable diseases and nuclear mishaps.

Obama will likely be the next president. He will use that power to do things both good and bad. But when Americans look for tough, honest journalists to challenge him, where will we find them?

Michael Graham in the Boston Herald.


It is now possible to read almost anything you want about Obama. This is so much more than a story about the decline in newspaper sales. This is about the "atomilogical" and the democratisation of doubt. How on earth do we trust?


Become a farmer? Or an eco-entrepreneur? From Forbes.

In fact, Murray says that while many local papers are experiencing single-digit year-over-year advertising declines, some of those serving farming communities or energy boomtowns are actually growing.

Uh oh, an argument in favor of the newspaper industry? Not likely. The big papers, at least, will be making headlines with lay-offs and dwindling revenues for some time to come.

Or just tell it as you see it - from George Packer's New Yorker blog:

Wading for a few minutes through the sewage of these Web sites reminds me uncannily of the time I’ve spent having political discussions in certain living rooms and coffee shops in Baghdad. The mental atmosphere is exactly the same—the wild fantasies presented as obvious truth, the patterns seen by those few with the courage and wisdom to see, the amused pity for anyone weak-minded enough to be skeptical, the logic that turns counter-evidence into evidence and every random piece of information into a worldwide conspiracy. Above all, the seething resentment, the mix of arrogance and impotent rage that burns at the heart of the paranoid style in politics.

And for the bigger picture....?

Journalist wants to be called a "writer" now because the media is biased

A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer”, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist.

Read on here.


Update.