MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 8): Movies from Books, Digital Music, Coriolanus, Larsson & Journalists + More

From the Independent "Hollywood ate my Novel"

Novelists reveal what it’s like to have their book turned into a movie

Literary adaptations rule this year's Oscar nominations. But, for an author, having a book transformed by movie magic isn't always pleasant. Five writers tell Charlotte Philby what it's like to see your creation 'brought to life'.

Improving digital music but will we notice? (Economist):

Rock-and-roll, as usual, is leading the way. Bands such as Pearl Jam and Metallica have used FLAC to sell recordings of their concerts online. The rocker John Mellencamp issued a CD in 2008, which came with a lossless high-definition version on a DVD to demonstrate what the music should really sound like. In 2009, the Canadian singer/songwriter Neil Young ("the Godfather of Grunge") released the first of what is to be a ten-volume set of archives on Blu-ray Disc as well as CD and DVD. With its lossless codecs, Blu-ray can play high-resolution music way beyond a CD’s dynamic range.

Whether the listening public can actually hear the subtleties being conveyed is another matter. The perceived quality of a recording depends on what the listener’s ears have been trained on (as well as the quality of the audio equipment and the ambient noise). Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford University in California, gets his incoming students every year to listen to a variety of recordings compressed with different algorithms. Each year, their preference for music in MP3 format increases.

 Is Coriolanus relevant today? (Intelligent Life):

And yet a doubt persists: how “relevant” can this Shakespeare play be made to the present? Coriolanus’s tragedy begins after his return as a victorious general, when his mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and his mentor (Brian Cox) want to capitalise on his military success by turning him into a politician as consul to the Senate. Coriolanus succumbs to their idea, but won’t play the part that political success requires. He won’t flatter the rabble he despises, won’t woo them, refuses to dissemble. His political opponents—two consummate performances by James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson—will of course do all these things and more. They know how to play the crowd, when to make it angry and when to please it, and naturally they win. We’re familiar with this depiction of politics as a tactical game played out by self-seeking hypocrites; physically at least, Jesson’s Brutus reminded me of Tony Blair’s smooth legal chum, Lord (Charlie) Falconer. It’s Coriolanus who is the unfamiliar figure in the film, the protagonist who tests our understanding and forfeits our sympathy because there is so very little in him to like. 

From the Guardian: Radical alternatives to conventional publishing (Guardian):

A new breed of radical publisher has emerged in recent years, with writers responding very quickly to current events. Here, some of their authors explain what marks them out.

One of the most exciting radical presses at the moment is Zer0 books. A shoestring operation begun in 2009 by the novelist Tariq Goddard, its impressive backlist covers philosophy, political theory, music criticism, contemporary cinema and much more. Its highlights include: Ivor Southwood's mordant Non-Stop Inertia, about the culture of precariousness that defines the modern workplace; and Marcello Carlin's The Blue In The Air, gorgeously constructed essays about pop, written by a widower while waiting for his new wife to fly over from Toronto so that they can start their new life together.
Zer0 has been particularly good at identifying a nexus of young, savvy writers – such as Owen Hatherley, Laurie Penny, Nina Power and Mark Fisher (better known as K-Punk) – whose work had previously surfaced mainly on blogs and whose bylines now regularly appear but in mainstream newspapers and journals.

It's been forever since we read a Steig Larsson article but the Columbia Journalism Review has stated our appetite (CJR):

But what make the trilogy so valuable to the cause of journalism are the things it gets right. Over the course of more than 1,750 pages, its author captures a remarkable number of the challenges that doing honest journalism involves, as well as the reasons it matters whether people keep doing it. This is significant, given the profession’s apparent inability to make a compelling case for itself, at least in the eyes of the readers, viewers, and listeners who do not appear to be concerning themselves terribly much with its rapid disappearance. The journalists’ credo can be found in the instructions offered by Erika Berger, Blomkvist’s lover, best friend, and editor, to one of the young writers in her employ: “Your job description as a journalist is to question and scrutinize critically—never to repeat claims uncritically, no matter how highly placed the sources in the bureaucracy. Don’t ever forget that.” This could sound like the kind of pabulum that has entered into the speeches of all the gruff, quietly heroic newspaper editors once concocted by Hollywood, from Humphrey Bogart in Deadline, USA through Jason Robards in All the President’s Men. But in Larsson’s gothic and twisted murder mysteries, the attention to journalistic detail with which readers must identify to make it to the end can only endear them to the men and women sufficiently dedicated to Berger’s lofty mission statement to stick with it.

From Twitter:

How Companies Learn Your Secrets: http://nyti.ms/zcyXOc

The publishing industry has gone mad for film-style trailers - Features - Books - Independent

I made Sunday dinner this week - which Mrs PND couldn't quite believe:  Bo Ssam

History of Electronic Transformation in the Story of the San Jose Mercury News

I think I tweeted this article several months ago but I was reminded of it again during a pre-conference session at Tools of Change this morning.  The article from the Columbia Journalism Review is a fascinating tale of how an established media outlet - one in many ways pre-disposed to change - struggled to make the right decisions, the right investments and do these at the right time.

Here are some snips (These are fairly deep in the article - CJR):

By the time William Glaberson of the New York Times came to visit in early 1994, some five thousand new AOL subscribers had signed up to receive Mercury Center. The number, Glaberson noted, represented less than 20 percent of AOL’s subscribers in the Bay Area and less than 2 percent of the Merc’s readers. But Glaberson’s report in the Times was all that Ingle, Mitchell, and their staff could have asked for. Even with new sites at the Chicago Tribune, Gannett’s Florida Today, and a handful of other papers, it had taken less than a year for Mercury Center to emerge as arguably the most ambitious experiment in how to weave the new technologies into an existing news operation.

It was not only the volume of services that set it apart, but the extent to which the electronic services so dramatically expanded the definition of what it meant to be in the news business. Mercury Center, Glaberson noted, had carried an online chat with San Jose’s mayor, offered its telephone-only subscribers recordings of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches, posted press releases (much to the newsroom’s consternation), and had also made available archives of all stories that had appeared in the newspaper since 1985. The archives, which came with an additional fee, had proven to be particularly popular. Ingle had thought their greatest appeal would be to schoolchildren working on reports. But the traffic was heaviest during the day, suggesting that the biggest users were business people eager for information about their industries and competitors.

Ingle told Glaberson that he was envisioning a new breed of journalist, dispatched with the sort of equipment that would allow filing in all sorts of ways, not merely for print. He called them “multimedia reporters.” Still, for the print side, the connection between the newspaper and Mercury Center involved little more than the addition of codes at the bottom of printed stories, so that readers could log on, or call in, for more. Some reporters had begun online conversations with their readers (everyone was asked to respond to reader e-mails). Others told Glaberson they saw the back and forth as peripheral to their work.
.....

Christensen, a devout Mormon, was staking out a position that bordered on business heresy. In the face of disruptive technology, he wrote, the wise course was not to react to the demands of existing customers. It was imperative to lower revenue expectations for the products spun off by those new technologies. And it was essential to accept the inevitability of failure. If sustaining technology brought reassurance, disruptive technology sowed doubt.

Yates had been with Knight Ridder long enough to recognize how much Christensen’s case mirrored what had taken place at her company. Knight Ridder, under Jim Batten, had ended the Viewtron experiment because the market was judged too small and the cost too high. But now Christensen was presenting an argument suggesting that, in essence, the company had had it all wrong—that because it had lost so much money it could not appreciate that Viewtron did, in fact, serve a market, albeit a small one that could, over time, develop into a far larger one, once the technology became cheaper, accessible, and efficient. Once the personal computer with a high-speed modem became a household fixture, the newspaper would cease being the best way to read, and more importantly, to search for jobs, employees, cars, and homes. That was the moment of disruption. And when it occurred, the companies that had been cultivating their shares of the emerging markets found themselves no longer at the periphery, but, like eBay, in a position to dominate a market that, not so long before, did not appear to exist.

As if by chance, Ingle had in 1990 come upon the very corrective in Mercury Center that Christensen would prescribe seven years later—a small, inexpensive laboratory for trying out those disruptive technologies, a place where modest successes could be celebrated and built upon, a “skunk works” operation that the company could keep running as it waited to see whether the new markets might emerge, or existing ones catch up.

Note: Christensen wrote The Innovators Dilemma which was also specifically referred to this morning.

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 46): WW I Archive Goes Online, Mrs Beeton's 150, Silicon Valley's Daily, Cookbook Aps +More

An archive trove of documents relating to the first world war is to go online (Guardian):

Living witnesses to the war may no longer be with us, but British archives still hold a wealth of original documentation from those years and, although much of it is in danger of crumbling away, the range of testimony held by the British Library helps to broaden understanding of the war.
In an unprecedented effort to make this material available to the widest possible public, the library is to join forces with 12 European partners – including national libraries in Rome, Berlin, Paris and Copenhagen – to put key documents and images on the internet. The new three-year project, Remembering the First World War, will be finished in time for the ceremonies to mark the centenary of the outbreak of war in 2014. 

More than 400,000 first world war source materials, many of them rare and highly fragile due to the deterioration of the paper on which they are printed, will be freely available online for the first time. Those interested in finding out more about the conflict will no longer have to apply to see documents in person in the reading rooms of Europe.

"It is particularly important that this project includes organisations that were involved in different sides of the conflict," said Jamie Andrews from the British Library, who is leading the British project.

Mrs Beeton's cookbook is 150 years old. How do the recipes stand up? (Intelligent Life):

Beeton was a hard-pressed journalist rather than a practised cook: her biographer, Kathryn Hughes, says there is no evidence “that Isabella was interested in cooking”. Compiled under pressure of deadline, the recipes were shamelessly purloined from other cookbooks. Beeton’s claim in advertisements for the book that every recipe was tested seems doubtful, judging by her odder instructions. She maintains that large carrots should be boiled for 1 3/4 to 2 1/4 hours and macaroni for 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 hours. Oddly, her recipe for haricot mutton contains no haricot beans, and she suggests that Brussels sprouts “may be arranged on the dish in the form of a pineapple”.  

On the plus side, “Household Management” is punctuated with background information about food. We learn that black turkey “approaches nearest to the original stock and is esteemed the best”. Beeton’s advice on fresh-cooked lobster could scarcely be bettered for precision. It should have “a stiffness in the tail which, if gently raised, will return with a spring”. Current culinary opinion has come back to her view on butter, “nutritious and…far more easily digested than any other of the oleaginous substances sometimes used in its place”. And the book as a whole provides a magnificent panorama of food in the middle of the 19th century. Along with items that have remained mainstays of British cuisine—rib of beef, pork pie, Welsh rarebit and bread-and-butter pudding (“better for being made about two hours before it is baked”)—there are numerous other recipes that have been forgotten.

The Columbia Journalism Review notes some sloppy citations on the Poynter Romenesko blog and all hell brakes loose (Poynter):

One danger of this practice is that the words may appear to belong to Jim when they in fact belong to another.

This style represents Jim’s deliberate choice to be transparent about the information’s origins while using the source’s own words to represent his or her work. If only for quotation marks, it would be exactly right. Without those quotation marks, it is incomplete and inconsistent with our publishing practices and standards on Poynter.org.

A long discussion of the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s own daily, which as CJR notes was poised to ride the digital whirlwind. What happened? (CJR):

Dave Butler has been a newspaperman since 1972, a self-described journeyman who became the editor of the Mercury News in 2008. The paper had been sold two years earlier by its longtime parent company, Knight Ridder, to the McClatchy Company. McClatchy in turn quickly sold it to MediaNews Group, whose chairman, Dean Singleton, put Butler in charge. Three months into the job, Butler wrote a memo to the staff, outlining a vision that could essentially be boiled down to a simple premise: the past could no longer animate the Mercury News. The days of four hundred people in the newsroom, revenues of $300 million and profit margins north of 30 percent, a bureau in Hanoi, aPulitzer for foreign news, Spanish and Vietnamese language editions, and a Sunday magazine, were gone. The staff of the Merc, now about half the size it was at its peak in the late 1990s, had no choice but to press on with vigor and a sense of mission: “Let’s carve some new trails in the jungle of journalism!”

Butler has the advantage of having missed his paper’s past, and so is unencumbered by the memory of what the place had been, not so long ago. Randall Keith knew. He had arrived earlier, in 1998, just in time to watch the great tech bubble inflate, carrying the Merc along with it. He had left a job as city editor of the Quincy, Massachusetts, Patriot Ledger to join a paper with a national reputation both for its journalism and its profitability. Time magazine had several years earlier dubbed the Merc the nation’s most tech-savvy newspaper. Its revenues from classified advertising—especially recruitment ads for all those many high-tech companies whose every product roll out and inevitable IPO were covered by the paper’s burgeoning business staff—had fueled ever more revenue, $288 million the year Keith arrived.

From the Observer: Ahmed Mourad was Hosni Mubarak's personal photographer and a thriller writer. (Observer):

"I was ready to explode because I had been living a dual life for five years, like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde," says the dapper, quietly spoken Mourad. "During the day, I spent hours working with Hosni Mubarak – a man who had been burying the dreams of Egyptians for three decades – and at night I was with my friends, who were cursing him and wishing he would disappear. What was really making me angry was that I knew the Egyptian people were destined to live better and he was the reason why that wasn't happening." 

So was Mourad in fear for his job – or, indeed, his life – when Vertigo appeared? He does not answer the question directly. "I didn't think it would be published, but I would never have forgiven myself if I hadn't written down what I was thinking, if I hadn't joined the revolution," he says. "I would have regretted my silence."

I'll have an App for Christmas dinner (Observer):

Yet those domestic chefs who have long treasured their dog-eared copies of classics by Elizabeth David, Madhur Jaffrey or Delia Smith may find it difficult to accept a technological upgrade. Whether a favourite cookbook is marked with telling splashes and scribbled comments, or is merely read in bed, performing the function of a familiar comfort blanket, it still delivers something that the food writer and television presenter Jay Rayner suspects cannot be replaced.

"A cooking app is a brilliant thing, until you have to turn the page with hands caked in dough. A stained cookery-book page is a mark of commitment; a stained smartphone is a trip back to the shop," he suggests.

To develop the look of the new apps, publishers have brought in designers to draw up cartoon-like cooking aids that avoid the high production costs of filming a live chef working in a kitchen. Early internet services, such as the innovative British website Videojug, are still proving popular, but new, stylish, illustrated apps are coming up fast. From next summer even the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in New York will require its students to come equipped with a tablet computer pre-loaded with the school's new app.

From Twitter:

The future of books? Publishing by numbers: IrishTimes

Self publishing textbooks online saves Minnesota school district $175,000 (Link)

Australia gives up battle protecting its publishers, will reduce timeframe for retention of territorial copyright (PW)

Alec Baldwin hands over $250 Large to East Hampton public library. (EHampton)