DanThornton

Tech, Geekery, Pop Culture, Miscellaneous

Playing to an empty room on the internet

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There’s an article from Guitar World many years ago which has stayed with me all this time. It asked whether readers would be as dedicated to practising, if any chance of playing to a live audience was taken away.

At the time, I practised guitar daily, and could never imagine that would change. But over the years there have been times when I’ve gone weeks or months between picking up an instrument. Part of it was due to work and life commitments, but a larger part was the fact I haven’t been in a band for years.

I’ve never been a skilled or virtuoso guitar player (I’d say I’m workmanlike at best), so being on stage in a group was a massive part of the motivation for me to spend hours on scales, learning new songs and making sure I wouldn’t mess up too badly.

Playing to an empty room on the internet
Playing to an empty room on the internet

At the same time, I’ve written and published some type of article online pretty much every day for 20 years. Much of it was professional work for employers or clients, but alongside that has always been blogging and other side projects.

My personal projects have rarely been set up as focused, profitable business ventures. Generally they’ve been opportunities for me to write about things I care about, and potentially grow an audience and a small income stream over time. And while they’ve never made much money, a surprisingly large number of people have visited them over the years.

But recently, that’s all changed.

Even before the rise of inescapable AI, Google’s regular algorithm updates results in demoting a lot of small sites and blogs. And then came AI overviews and search tools cutting traffic overnight as Google went from organising the world’s information to simply republishing it all themselves without permission or financial compensation.

I don’t think any search engine owes me rankings or traffic, and my advice has always been to diversify where your audience comes from. You should never rely on a third party business being nice enough to publicise you for free, whether that’s a search engine, social network or anywhere else.

But when I’m focused on ensuring client sites have multiple, sustainable sources of business whatever happens, it means I don’t have much time left to spend on my own projects. Especially when they were always primarily about the writing. I grew up loving books, magazines, comics and fanzines, and my sites were the result of wanting to create my own versions.

Putting aside the debates about AI, search engines and whether I could pivot to video, creating NFTs or selling products, I come back to the original question.

Will I still write as much if no-one comes to read it? Or even find it?

The honest answer is that at the moment I don’t know. With client work, there’s still a need for human input to create articles that work for SEO, which still effectively powers AI results. But writing for side projects purely for fun and the possibility that it might pay off financially or otherwise at some point?

It’d be nice to think I’ll keep going no matter what, because of my love of the art of writing. But part of what first attracted me wasn’t the ink on a page – it was the impact that the right words or phrases could have on someone reading them. And I’m still fascinated by how everything from an advertising slogan to a novel can stay with someone for life, inspire them to turn their world upside down, or spend their money on something they never needed until now.

And I know I’m not the only person wondering whether they’ll be writing as much, or at all, in the future. Which raises all kinds of questions about creativity, information, bias and accessibility if all those voices go quiet. Even if it does mean I might have more time to pick up a guitar again…

Image by Jean-Jacques Halans via Unsplash

What Do We Want From Newspapers and Journalists?

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There’s an interesting interview at the New York Times between Public Editor Liz Spayd and Executive Editor Dean Baquet.

Most of it is pretty tame and logical, but a couple of answers stood out. For example, when questions about new changes coming to the NYT, Baquet said:

Trying to edit The Times the way we edited it in a purely print era is unreasonable. The layers of editing, the number of people who touch a story. The fact is that we now write so much more. Right now, as we talk, there’s a hearing on Russian hacking. I’ve been in meetings all day, but we’ve probably written 10 posts. All of those posts, and the large print stories done at the end of the day, cannot be edited in the same way. The challenge is how to still be fast and give people a story in a form that is accurate.

But do we want and need 10 posts on the Russian hacking hearing? Is that why people visit a newspaper, or would they actually be better served by longer, more thorough articles which go through an editing process closer to print?

In an era when anyone can be tweeting fiction and presenting it as news within seconds, or live streaming on Facebook, how often do we have time to visit a newspaper website and actually ingest all the coverage of a particular event if it’s spread across so many places?

New York Times Building by Torrenegra on Flickr

It’s a paradox which every publication struggles with. And that challenge comes up just a few questions later, when asked about a way in which The New York Times has failed its readers, and Baquet picks out the use of social media.

I think sometimes reporters and editors go over the line. Or are a little ham-handed in their language in a way they wouldn’t be in the pages of The Times. And I think people think that’s easy to police. It’s not. I want people to interact with readers. I want reporters and editors interacting with the wider world. But I think we sometimes cross the line, and we need to figure out a way to not do that.

It’s almost as if the goal will be to have news coverage which is incredibly fast, efficient and streamlines editing and fact checking as much as possible. But the fastest, most efficient ways for staff to communicate needs to be edited and fact checked to prevent them from doing something wrong.

I’d propose a simpler solution.

Use social media and let staff get everything out as quickly as possible (within legal and grammatical rules, certainly), and use the website as the publication of record when I want 1 or 2 articles that give me a complete, thorough, and accurate report of what has happened in the world.

I’m not going to visit the NYT website 10 times in a day. But when I visit it once or twice (often as a result of seeing something recommended on social media), I want it to be worth the effort.

 

Image by Torrenegra on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Support the Campaign to Repeal Section 40

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How do you feel about having your world shaped entirely by the wealthy in a fake news, post truth world? Because Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act makes that very possible – even beyond what we’ve seen in 2016.

Put simply, any small newspaper or multi-author website/blog can write something true, and prove it in court, but in the process be completely bankrupted by having to pay the costs run up by the person who has sued them.

That also includes campaigning groups.

So basically, it won’t matter if you know about wrongdoing or corruption by any wealthy individual. It won’t matter whether or not you have proof which can be shown in court that what you know is true.

All that will matter is that the majority of people and organisations won’t ever be able to publish it without going bankrupt in the process.

 

You can support the campaign to Repeal The Gagging Clause by signing the Open Rights Group petition. There’s also probably never been a better or more important time to support somethine like ORG by joining or donating.