Root Privileges

journalism

Blogging at NYTimes and The Hindu

I’m going to draw some parallels here between the The New York Times and The Hindu in the context of Times’s decision to shut or merge up to half of its blogs (Disclosure: I launched The Hindu Blogs in December 2012 and coordinated the network until May 2014). This is not about money-making, at least not directly, as much as about two newspapers faced with similar economic problems at vastly different scales confronting the challenges of multi-modal publishing. Times’ decision to move away from blogs, which was brought to wider attention when Green went offline in March 2013, is not to be confused with its rejection of blogging. In fact, it’s the opposite, as Andrew Beaujon wrote for Poynter:

Assistant Managing Editor Ian Fisher told Poynter in a phone call: “We’re going to continue to provide bloggy content with a more conversational tone,” he said. “We’re just not going to do them as much in standard reverse-chronological blogs.”

This is mixed news for blogs. The experimental quality in the early days of blogging – which blogs both fed and fed off – is what inspired many post formats to emerge over the years and compete with each other. This competition was intensified as more news-publishers came online and, sometime in the late 2000s, digital journalism knew it was time for itself to take shape. The blog may have been fluidly defined but its many mutations weren’t and they were able to take root – most recognizably in the form of Facebook, whose integrated support for a variety of publishing modes and forums made the fluidity of blogging look cumbersome.

The stage was set for blogs to die but in a very specific sense: It is the container that is dying. This is good for blogs because the styles and practices of blogging live on, just the name doesn’t. This isn’t only a conceptual but also a technical redefinition because what killed blogs is also what might keep the digital news-publishing industry alive. It’s called modularization.

The modular newsroom

While I was at The Hindu, I sometimes found it difficult to think like the reader because it was not easy to forget the production process. The CMS is necessarily convoluted because if it aspires to make the journalist’s life easier, it has to be ‘department’-agnostic: print, online, design and production have to work seamlessly on it, and each of those departments has a markedly distinguished workflow. There is that obvious downside of ponderousness but on such issues you have to take a side.

One reason Beaujon cites for Times’ decision is their blogs’ CMS’s reluctance to play along with the rest of the site’s (which recently received a big redesign). I can’t say the problem is very different at The Hindu. In either institution, the management’s call will be to focus the CMS on whichever product/department/service is making the biggest profits (assuming one of them does that by a large margin) – and blogs, despite often being the scene of “cool” content, are not prioritized. The Schulzbergers have already done this by choosing to focus on one product while, at The Hindu, Editor Malini Parthasarathy has in the last two months ramped up her commitment to its digital platform with the same urgency as could have been asked of Siddharth Varadarajan had he been around.

The reason I said the demise of the container was also technical because, in order to keep a department-agnostic CMS both lightweight and seamless (not to mention affordable), larger organizations must ensure they eliminate redundant tasks by, say, getting a “print” journalist to publish his/her story online as well. Second, the org. must also build a CMS focused on interoperability as much as intra-operability. Technically speaking, each department should be an island that communicates with another by exchanging information formatted in a particular way or according to some standards.

Fragmenting the news

This is similar to blogs because the fragmentation that helped make it popular is also what has helped establish its biggest competitors, like tumblelogs, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc., and each of these modes in turn are inspiring new ways to tell stories. A more modularized newsroom in the same vein will be able to tell different kinds of stories and be more adaptive to change and shock, not to mention better positioned to serve the fragmenting news. Better yet, this will also give journalists the opportunity to develop unique workflows and ethos to deal specifically with their work. That’s one thing that doesn’t bode well for the unfortunate blogs at the Times: “reintegration” is always accompanied by some losses.

Through all of this, anyway, the good name of “news-site” might become lost but we mustn’t underestimate our readers to not be able to spot the news under any other name.

However, this is where the similarities between the two organizations do end because they operate in drastically different markets. While traffic on both sites mostly entered ‘sideways’, i.e. from a link shared on the social media or on the site homepage instead of from the blogs landing page, what it did for the site itself is different. For one, among the people The Hindu calls its audience, purchasing power is way lower, so the symmetry that the Times might enjoy in terms of ad rates in print and on the web is just almost-impossible to achieve in India. This makes the battle to optimize UX with income grittier within Indian publications. The quality of the news is also nothing to write home about, although there is reason to believe that is changing as it’s less shackled by infrastructural considerations. Consider Scroll.in or Homegrown.

These are, of course, nascent thoughts, the knee-jerk inspired by learning that the Times was shutting The Lede. But let’s not lament the passing of the blog, it was meant to happen. On the other hand, the blog’s ability to preserve its legacy by killing itself could have many lessons for the newsroom.

Jun 27, 2014
The wayward and cowardly introspector
No water and power at home today, so I wish you a horrible Tamil New Year’s Day, too. With nothing much to do – and the sun beating down upon Chennai at an unwavering 33° C that, in the company of still airs and 80% humidity, feels simply unlivable in – I sat around almost all day and thought about my life. Yes, unlivable-in conditions are always a good time to think about life.

For the last three weeks, the science editor at The Hindu, the man who becomes my boss every Wednesday, has been getting irritated at me and with good reason: I haven’t written anything for the science page. In fact, my only contribution to this page that comes out every Thursday has been the correction of a few spelling mistakes.

I’m not going to go on about not finding stories that suit my style or some shit like that. I haven’t been writing because I haven’t been looking for stories, and I haven’t been writing because, somehow, I haven’t been able to write. Yes, writers’ block (I’ve always doubted the validity of this excuse – sure, writers claim to experience it all the time, but what are the symptoms? I’m actually surprised the condition’s immense subjectivity hasn’t seen itself forced into nonexistence).

Why haven’t I been looking for stories? Two reasons. 1) I’m not able to ‘care about the world’ in that ‘direction’, and 2) Some other stuff came my way that seemed quite exciting. This isn’t to say writing stories for The Hindu isn’t exciting: I get such a kick out of seeing my name in one of the most respected newspapers in India.

You see, my responsibilities at The Hindu include (but are not limited to) writing for the science page once a week, writing a fortnightly column for Education Plus, concocting a weekly science quiz for the In School edition, handling The Hindu Blogs – that means ensuring our bloggers are happy and motivated, the content always meets the high standards we’ve come to set, the blogs section of the site is doing well in terms of hits and user engagement, and bringing in more bloggers into the fray – working with visualizations, writing that occasional OpEd, and helping out with the tech. side of things – editorially or managerially.

So not writing for the science page doesn’t really leave me in the lurch. I can’t just sit idle.

The writers’ block, I must admit, is just me losing interest, probably because I cycle my attention to focus on different things periodically over time.

Through this introspection, I’ve realized that I’m not interested in being a journalist. I’ve just been wayward in life, not paying much attention to what I’ve been or not been interested in, while following these simple rules which The Hindu has found a way to use:
1. Don’t give up… easily.
2. Always contribute.
3. Take initiative.
The pro is that, even while working with a national daily, I’ve worked in a variety of environments that any other pukka journalist might not have had the opportunity to. The con is that I can’t think of anything I’m specialized to do.

Well, there’s blogging. I can’t really put my finger on why but I love blogging. I love writing – good writing, especially (I only recently found a mentor who could really help me improve my narratives) – and I love creating such writing about different things in my life, and I love enabling other people to do the same thing.

But the buck stops there.

There’s another route I’ve often considered – academics, research, philosophy, the like – but I’ve been repeatedly convinced by a friend that if I really want to make a difference, I should consider journalism to be a better option than sitting at a desk and writing about metaphysical stuff. Right now, I’m considering academics all over again. Maybe an hour from now that friend will turn up and tell me why I’m thinking wrong.

But by then, all this wonderment will have festered into one giant carbuncle of self-doubt and, eventually, that ultimate question: What if my interests and strengths don’t coincide with the activities that are capable of making a difference in this world? Or is the pursuit of individual interests the biggest difference anyone can make?

OK, I know what I need. I need the guts to be able to answer these questions myself.
Apr 14, 2013
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Apr 5, 2013
The post-reporter era II

When a print-publication decides to go online, it will face a set of problems that is wholly unique and excluded from the set of problems it will have faced before. Keeping in mind that such an organization functions as a manager of reporters, and that those reporters will have already (hopefully) made the transition from offline-only to online-publishing as well, there is bound to be an attrition between how individuals see their stories and how the organization sees what it can do with those stories.

The principal cause of this problem – if that – is the nature of property on the world wide web. The newspaper isn’t the only portal on the internet where news is published and consumed, therefore its views on “its news” cannot be monopolistic. A reporter may not be allowed to publish his story with two publications if he works for either publication. This view is especially exacerbated if the two are competitors. On the web, however, who are you competing with?

On the web, news-dissemination may not be the only agenda of those locations where news is still consumed in large quantities. The Hindu or The Times of India keeping their reporters from pushing their agenda on Facebook or Twitter is just laughable: it could easily and well be considered censorship. At the same time, reporters abstain from a free exchange of ideas with the situation on the ground over the social networks because they’re afraid someone else might snap up their idea. In other words, Facebook/Twitter have become the battleground where the traditional view of information-ownership meets the emerging view.

The traditional newspaper must disinvest of its belief that news is a matter of money as well as of moral and historical considerations, and start to inculcate that, with the advent of information-management models for whom the “news” is not the most valuable commodity, news is of any value only for its own sake.

Where does this leave the reporter? For example, if a print-publication has promulgated an idea to host its reporters’ blogs, who owns the content on the blogs? Does the publication own the content because it has been generated with the publication’s resources? Or does the reporter own the content because it would’ve been created even if not for the publication’s resources? There are some who would say that the answers to these questions depends on what is being said.

If it’s a matter of opinion, then it may be freely shared. If it’s a news report, then it may not be freely shared. If it’s an analysis, then it may be dealt with on an ad hoc basis. No; this will not work because, simply put, it removes from the consistency of the reporter’s rights and, by extension, his opinions. It removes from the consistency of what the publication thinks “its” news is and what “its” news isn’t. Most of all, it defies the purpose of a blog itself – it’s not a commercial venture but an informational one. So… now what?

Flout ’em and scout ’em, and scout ’em and flout ’em;
Thought is free.

Stephano, The Tempest, Act 3: Scene II

News for news’s sake, that’s what. The deviation of the web from the commoditization of news to the commoditization of what presents that news implies a similar deviation for anyone who wants to be part of an enhanced enterprise. Don’t try to sell the content of the blogs: don’t restrict its supply and hope its value will increase; it won’t. Instead, drive traffic through the blogs themselves – pull your followers from Facebook and Twitter – and set up targeted-advertising on the blogs. Note, however, that this is only the commercial perspective.

What about things on the other side of the hypothetical paywall? Well, how much, really, has the other side mattered until now?

Nov 25, 2012
The travails of science communication

There’s an interesting phenomenon in the world of science communication, at least so far as I’ve noticed. Every once in a while, there comes along a concept that is gaining in research traction worldwide but is quite tricky to explain in simple terms to the layman.

Earlier this year, one such concept was the Higgs mechanism. Between December 13, 2011, when the first spotting of the Higgs boson was announced, and July 4, 2012, when the spotting was confirmed as being the piquingly-named “God particle”, the use of the phrase “cosmic molasses” was prevalent enough to prompt an annoyed (and struggling-to-make-sense) Daniel Sarewitz to hit back on Nature. While the article had a lot to say, and a lot more waiting there to just to be rebutted, it did include this remark:

If you find the idea of a cosmic molasses that imparts mass to invisible elementary particles more convincing than a sea of milk that imparts immortality to the Hindu gods, then surely it’s not because one image is inherently more credible and more ‘scientific’ than the other. Both images sound a bit ridiculous. But people raised to believe that physicists are more reliable than Hindu priests will prefer molasses to milk. For those who cannot follow the mathematics, belief in the Higgs is an act of faith, not of rationality.

Sarewitz is not wrong in remarking of the problem as such, but in attempting to use it to define the case of religion’s existence. Anyway: In bridging the gap between advanced physics, which is well-poised to “unlock the future”, and public understanding, which is well-poised to fund the future, there is good journalism. But does it have to come with the twisting and turning of complex theory, maintaining only a tenuous relationship between what the metaphor implies and what reality is?

The notion of a “cosmic molasses” isn’t that bad; it does get close to the original idea of a pervading field of energy whose forces are encapsulated under certain circumstances to impart mass to trespassing particles in the form of the Higgs boson. Even this is a “corruption”, I’m sure. But what I choose to include or leave out makes all the difference.

The significance of experimental physicists having probably found the Higgs boson is best conveyed in terms of what it means to the layman in terms of his daily life and such activities more so than trying continuously to get him interested in the Large Hadron Collider. Common, underlying curiosities will suffice to to get one thinking about the nature of God, or the origins of the universe, and where the mass came from that bounced off Sir Isaac’s head. Shrouding it in a cloud of unrelated concepts is only bound to make the physicists themselves sound defensive, as if they’re struggling to explain something that only they will ever understand.

In the process, if the communicator has left out things such as electroweak symmetry-breaking and Nambu-Goldstone bosons, it’s OK. They’re not part of what makes the find significant for the layman. If, however, you feel that you need to explain everything, then change the question that your post is answering, or merge it with your original idea, etc. Do not indulge in the subject, and make sure to explain your concepts as a proper fiction-story: Your knowledge of the plot shouldn’t interfere with the reader’s process of discovery.

Another complex theory that’s doing the rounds these days is that of quantum entanglement. Those publications that cover news in the field regularly, such as R&D mag, don’t even do as much justice as did SciAm to the Higgs mechanism (through the “cosmic molasses” metaphor). Consider, for instance, this explanation from a story that appeared on November 16.

Electrons have a property called “spin”: Just as a bar magnet can point up or down, so too can the spin of an electron. When electrons become entangled, their spins mirror each other.

The causal link has been omitted! If the story has set out to explain an application of quantum entanglement, which I think it has, then it has done a fairly good job. But what about entanglement-the-concept itself? Yes, it does stand to lose a lot because many communicators seem to be divesting of its intricacies and spending more time explaining why it’s increasing in relevance in modern electronics and computation. If relevance is to mean anything, then debate has to exist – even if it seems antithetical to the deployment of the technology as in the case of nuclear power.

Without understanding what entanglement means, there can be no informed recognition of its wonderful capabilities, there can be no public dialog as to its optimum use to further public interests. When when scientific research stops contributing to the latter, it will definitely face collapse, and that’s the function, rather the purpose, that sensible science communication serves.

Nov 17, 2012
Plotting a technological history of journalism
Electric telegraph
- July 27, 1866 – SS Great Eastern completes laying of Transatlantic telegraphic cables
- By 1852, miles of American telegraphic wires had grown from 40 in 1846 to 23,000
- In 1849-1869, telegraphic mileage had increased by 108,000 miles
Cost of information transmission fell with its increasing ubiquity as well as instantization of global communication.
- Usefulness of information was preserved through transmission-time, increasing its shelf-life, making production of information a significant task
- Led to a boost in trade as well
Advent of war – especially political turmoil in Europe and the American Civil War – pushed rapid developments in its technology.

These last mentioned events led to establishment of journalism as a recognized profession
- Because it focused finally on locating and defining local information,
- Because transmission of information could now be secured through other means,
- And prompted newspaper establishments to install information-transmission services of their own –
- Leading to proliferation of competition and an emphasis on increase of the quality of reportage
The advent of the electric telegraph, a harbinger of the “small world” phenomenon, did not contribute to the refinement of journalistic genres as much as it helped establish them.

In the same period, rather from 1830 to 1870, significant political events that transpired alongside the evolution of communication, and were revolutionized by it, too, included the rapid urbanization in the USA and Great Britain (as a result of industrialization), the Belgian revolution, the first Opium War, the July revolution, the Don Pacifico affair, and the November uprising.

Other notable events include the laying of the Raleigh-Gaston railroad in North Carolina and advent of the first steam locomotives in England. Essentially, the world was ready to receive its first specialized story-tellers.

Photography

Picture on the web from mousebilenadam

Photography developed from the mid-19^th century onward. While it did not have as drastic an impact as did the electric telegraph, it has instead been undergoing a slew of changes the impetus of which comes from technological advancement. While black-and-white photography was prevalent for quite a while, it was color photography that refocused interested in using the technology to augment story-telling.
- Using photography to tell a story involves a trade-off between neutrality and subjective opinions
- A photographer, in capturing his subject, first identifies the subject such that it encapsulates emotions that he is looking for
Photography establishes a relationship between some knowledge of some reality and prevents interpretations from taking any other shape:
- As such a mode of story-telling, it is a powerful tool only when the right to do so is well-exercised, and there is no given way of determining that absolutely
- Through a lens is a powerful way to capture socio-history, and this preserve it in a columbarium of other such events, creating, in a manner of speaking, something akin to Asimov’s psycho-history
- What is true in the case of photo-journalism is only partly true in the case of print-based story-telling
Photography led to the establishment of perspectives, of the ability of mankind to preserve events as well as their connotations, imbuing new power into large-scale movements and revolutions. Without the ability to visualize connotations, adversarial journalism, and the establishment of the Fourth Estate as it were, may not be as powerful as it currently is because of its ability to provide often unambiguous evidence toward or against arguments.
- A good birthplace of the discussion on photography’s impact on journalism is Susan Sontag’s 1977 book, On Photography.
- Photography also furthered interest in the arts, starting with the contributions of William Talbot.
Television

Although television sets were introduced in the USA in the 1930s, a good definition of its impact came in the famous Wasteland Speech in 1961 by Newton Minow, speaking at a convention of the National Association of Broadcasters.

When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.

But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you’ll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

It is this space, the “vast wasteland”, upon the occupation of which came journalism and television together to redefine news-delivery.

It is a powerful tool for the promotion of socio-political agendas: this was most effectively demonstrated during the Vietnam War during which, as Michael Mandelbaum wrote in 1982,

… regular exposure to the early realities of battle is thought to have turned the public against the war, forcing the withdrawal of American troops and leaving the way clear for the eventual Communist victory.

This opinion, as expressed by then-president Lyndon Johnson, was also defended by Mandelbaum as a truism in the same work (Print Culture and Video Culture, vol. 111, no. 4, Daedalus, pp. 157-158).

In the entertainment versus informative programming debate, an important contribution was made by Neil Postman in his 1985 work Amusing Ourselves to Death, wherein he warned of the decline in humankind’s ability to communicate and share serious ideas and the role television played in this decline because of its ability to only transfer information, not interaction.

Watch here…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRabb6_Gr2Y?rel=0]

And continued here…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHd31L6XPEQ?rel=0]

.

Arguing along similar veins in his landmark speech in 1990 at a computer science meeting in Germany, Postman said,

Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19^th century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of information, until matters have reached such proportions today that, for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems.

In his conclusion, he blamed television for severing the tie between information and action.

The advent of the television also played a significant role in American feminism.
Oct 27, 2012
Credibility on the web
There are a finite number of sources from which anyone receives information. The most prominent among them are media houses (incl. newspapers, news channels, radio stations, etc.) and scientific journals (at least w.r.t. the subjects I work with).

Seen one way, these establishments generate the information that we receive. Without them, stories would remain localized, centralized, away from the ears that could accord them gravity.

Seen another way, these establishments are also motors: sans their motive force, information wouldn’t move around as it does, although this is assuming that they don’t mess with the information itself.

With more such “motors” in the media mix, the second perspective is becoming the norm of things. Even if information isn’t picked up by one house, it could be set sailing through a blog or a CJ initiative. The means through which we learn something, or stumble upon it for that matter, are growing to be more overlapped, lines crossing each others’ paths more often.

Veritably, it’s a maze. In such a labyrinthine setup, the entity that stands to lose the most is faith of a reader/viewer/consumer in the credibility of the information received.

In many cases, with a more interconnected web – the largest “supermotor” – the credibility of one bit of information is checked in one location, by one entity. Then, as it moves around, all following entities inherit that credibility-check.

For instance, on Wikipedia, credibility is established by citing news websites, newspaper/magazine articles, journals, etc. Jimmy Wales’ enterprise doesn’t have its own process of verification in place. Sure, there are volunteers who almost constantly police its millions of pages, but all they can do is check if the citation is valid, and if there are any contrarious reports, too, to the claims being staked.

One way or another, if a statement has appeared in a publication, it can be used to have the reader infer a fact.

In this case, Wikipedia has inherited the credibility established by another entity. If the verification process had failed in the first place, the error would’ve been perpetrated by different motors, each borrowing from the credibility of the first.

Moreover, the more strata that the information percolates through, the harder it will be to establish a chain of accountability.

*

My largest sources of information are:
1. Wikipedia
2. Journals
3. Newspapers
4. Blogs
(The social media is just a popular aggregator of news from these sources.)

Wikipedia cites news reports and journal articles.

News reports are compiled with the combined efforts of reporters and editors. Reporters verify the information they receive by checking if it’s repeated by different sources under (if possible) different circumstances. Editors proofread the copy and are (or must remain) sensitive to factual inconsistencies.

Journals have the notorious peer-reviewing mechanism. Each paper is subject to a thorough verification process intended to wean out all mistakes, errors, information “created” by lapses in the scientific method, and statistical manipulations and misinterpretations.

Blogs borrow from such sources and others.

Notice: Even in describing the passage of information through these ducts, I’ve vouched for reporters, editors, and peer-reviews. What if they fail me? How would I find out?

*

The point of this post was to illustrate
1. The onerous yet mandatory responsibility that verifiers of information must assume,
2. That there aren’t enough of them, and
3. That there isn’t a mechanism in place that periodically verifies the credibility of some information across its lifetime.
How would you ensure the credibility of all the information you receive?
Sep 8, 2012
Making money

An experimental “democratic” revenue model for news publications new to the internet (that are reluctant to change their delivery styles)

Jul 15, 2012
The post-reporter era

One of the foundation stones of journalism is the process of reporting. That there is a messenger working the gap between an event and a story provides for news to exist and exist with myriad nuances attached to it. There are ethical and moral issues, technical considerations, writing styles, and presentation formats to perfect. The entire news-publishing industry is centered on the activities of reporters and streamlining them.

What the reporter requires the most is… well, a few things. The first is a domain of events, from which he picks issues to talk about. The second is a domain of stories, into which he publishes his reports. The third is a platform using which he may incentivize this process for himself, and acquire the tools with which he may publish his stories efficiently and effectively. The last entity is more commonly understood in the form of a publishing house.

The reason I’ve broken the working of a reporter into these categories is to understand what makes a reporter at all. Today, a reporter is most commonly understood in terms of an individual who is employed with a publishing house and publishes stories for them. Ideally, however, everyone is a reporter: simply the creation of knowledge by people based on experiences around them should be qualification enough. This calls into question the role of a publishing house: is it a platform working with which reporters may function efficiently, or is it an employer of reporters?

If it’s an employer of reporters, then any publishing house wouldn’t have to worry about where the course of journalism is going to take the organization itself. Reporters will have to change the way they work – how they spot issues, evolving writing styles to suit their audiences, so forth – but the publishing house will retain ownership of the reporters themselves. As long as it’s not a platform which individuals use to function as reporters, things are going to be fine.

Now, let’s move to the post-reporter era, where everyone is a reporter (of course, that’s an idealized image, but even so). In this world, a reporter is not someone who works for a publishing house – that aspect of the word’s meaning is left behind in the age of the publishing house. In this world, a reporter is someone who works simply as a messenger between the domains of events and stories, where the role of the publishing house as the owner of reportage is absent.

The nature of such a world throws light on the valuation of information. When multiple reporters cover different events and return to HQ to file their stories, the house decides which stories make the cut and which don’t on the basis of a set of parameters. In other words, the house creates and assigns a particular value to each story, and then compares the values of different stories to determine their destiny.

In the post-reporter era, which is likely to be occupied by channels of individual presentation – ranging from word-of-mouth to full-scale websites – houses that thrive today on the valuation of information and the importance the houses’ readers place on it will steadily fade out. What exists will be an all-encompassing form of what is known as citizen journalism (CJ) today. Houses take to CJ because of the mutually beneficial relationship available therein: the CJ gets the coverage and the advantage of the issue pursued no longer being under wraps; the reporter gets a story that has both civic/criminal and human-interest angles to it.

However, when the CJ voids the relationship by refusing the intervention of a publishing/broadcasting house, and chooses to take his story straight to the people through a channel he finds effective enough, the house-level valuation of stories is replaced by a democratic institution that may or may not be guided by a paternalistic attitude.

Therefore, if a particular house has to survive into the post-reporter era, it must discard issue-valuation as an engine and instead rely on some other entity, such as one represented by a parameter whose efficiency is a maximizable quantity. This can be conceived as a fourth domain which, upon maximization, becomes the superset of which the three domains are subsets.

A counter-productive entity in this situation is that of property, which is accrued in great quantities by a high-achieving house in the present but which delays the onset of change in the future. Even when the house starts to experience slightly rougher weather, its first move will be to pump in more money, thereby offsetting change by some time. Only when the amount of property invested in delaying change is considerable will the house start to consider other alternatives, by which time other competing organizations will have moved into the future.

Jun 21, 2012