Archive for March, 2011
Ye Olde MOdulator-DEModulator Procured News-Paper
On the eve of the New York Times’ second attempt at establishing a paywall, Radley Balko points to a 1981 news report about using your home computer to read the newspaper. I love the fact that, in my lifetime, “Owns Home Computer” was text that one might put on a chyron.
What’s amazing though — acoustic coupler modem, ASCII-only display, and feathered haircuts aside — is that newspapers didn’t really know what they were doing in 1981, just as they don’t really seem to know what they’re doing now. Reports one editor, ”This is an experiment. We’re trying to figure out what it’s going to mean to us as editors and reporters, and what it means to the home user. And we’re not in it to make money, we’re probably not going to lose a lot but we’re not going to make much either.”
Spoiler alert: The clip closes with b-roll of a newspaper street vendor, concluding that he “isn’t worried about being out of a job.” But as the anchor reports, it cost $5 per hour to access the network (above marginal cost, by the way) and took 2 hours to download the paper; this means a price some fifty times higher than the dead-tree edition.
Why should one use Twitter?
This week marks Twitter’s 5th birthday, and Thursday, along with @adamthierer, I’m teaching a little introductory seminar at work on how to use the service. It’s a boon to anyone who’s job revolves around consuming and producing ideas and information, so it should be a no-brainer that most working in policy should be on it. But any time the subject comes up, skeptical rumblings resound.
Some of the folks we’ll be talking to are Twitter veterans and may be looking to share their own experience or pick up a pro tip, others are new to Twitter and have recently opened accounts, or don’t have accounts but are eager to learn. But then there are the folks, a bit older I have to say, who just aren’t interested.
Some are plain dismissive, in the “What do I care what someone had for breakfast” vein. Others seem overwhelmed and look at Twitter as one more damned thing they have to learn and manage. To them it’s a burden, not a benefit. Here’s a comment from an old post of Tyler’s on the same subject:
Personally, I dislike twitter because it becomes yet another thing that requires upkeep and saps attention from other projects.
There are only so many hours in the day, and I find social networks/e-mail/blackberries jarring and distracting. It outweighs any benefits I can imagine.
Looking back at what I first wrote about Twitter three years ago this month, I too was skeptical at first. Once I started using it, though, there was no looking back. It’s interesting that I wrote that I had “started to force myself to use Twitter to see if I can discover why people find it so compelling.” I guess only then did it seem obvious.
So how do one get skeptical folks to try it? Should one?
To the dismissive folks, I think the key is to explain that Twitter is a tool and it therefore can be used for good or ill. It can be used to only follow pop divas, or it can be used to follow the news, spread ideas, and have debates with other academics. I’m less sure what to say to the folks who answer, “Sure, but I already do that over email, research papers, op-eds, live debates, etc.” Simply answering that this is the new thing is not enough.
I think the immediacy of it is part of the answer, but that just further conjures up the image of another info-torrent one has to deal with. I think one way to answer is that just as Twitter has come on the stage as something new to deal with, mail, faxes, and even telephone calls have exited the stage. More importantly, though, is that Twitter is the kind of beast that doesn’t lend itself to an accurate personal cost-benefit analysis until one has used it. Its value is not easily understood from the outside.
So a little help, please. How do you take a 50-year-old who doesn’t use RSS feeds and get her to monitor a Twitter client? Is it even advisable?
Responding to Tim Lee on Reporting
At his blog, Tim Lee responds to my post from last week about the New York Times paywall, in Canada now and coming to the US next week. (How many things can you say that about?) I owe Tim an apology for not responding to his comments on my post, but I spent a large part of the weekend ensconced in my home office, attempting compliance with the federal tax code.
I’m not trying to blindly defend the existing model of journalism, or at least the model that has predominated for the previous decades. Like Tim, I’m excited to see new modes of journalism come up, and I agree with him that for much industry and niche reporting, the new model is extremely promising.
I’m just a bit more conservative than Tim about proclaiming that old media is dead and that the value provided by old-school journalists relative to bloggers and other new-media types (particularly amateurs) is negligible.
First, let me address the topic of shoe leather reporting. I don’t think of reporting on presidential press conferences as shoe leather reporting; that’s stenography. Tim’s right, very little original information is generated by the marginal reporter in the White House briefing room. But I don’t think that’s the right way to think about what quality reporting is.
What I mean by “shoe leather reporting” is, for instance, Dana Priest’s discovery of CIA black sites, or Sheri Fink’s incredible recreation of the struggle for survival in New Orleans hospitals during Hurricane Katrina. (Fink is a reporter with ProPublica, which Tim rightly cites as going good work. But this article wasn’t published on their web site; it was published in the New York Times, and for a reason.) For that matter, look at the incredible work done by the heroic reporters from the Times-Picayune in the days and weeks following Katrina; there were no bloggers or desk reporters with the capacity or capability to do the kind of quality reporting they did, day in and day out. I’d be happy to see a whole mess of either real journalists at streamlined operations or amateur reporters do this kind of work. But outside of niche publications, I don’t see it.
As an aside, I’m not sure that Tim’s point about sports reporting is exactly correct. The Internet doesn’t lower the costs of the Times reporting on Blue Jays games; ICTs generally do that, and we’ve had the basic tools of remote reporting in place for generations. I’m not sure why, if newspapers didn’t hire stringers to report on pro games in the 1950s and 1960s, the Internet makes that possible today. If the Times sent someone to Detroit in 1955 to report on a Dodgers-Tigers game, he would have phoned his story back into the Times newsroom. So would a stringer based in Detroit. So I think the case that the Internet has reduced the need for traveling reporters is a bit overstated.
Second, I think I’m not as willing as Tim to just write off an old business model simply because something that looks better comes along. Recall that people have been doing that with the legacy airlines for two decades, yet they still fly. The Times is still a valuable brand, and it may be that what it ends up doing in a decade is substantially different than what it does today or what it did ten years ago. I’m interested in observing the evolution of this business (think General Electric) and the news gathering industry. I hope the Times and others are challenged by the sources Tim names, because competition is good, not because I believe in a teleology of newspapers where their death is certain and it’s just a matter of time. The bigger question is whether the newspaper industry embraces modernity or acts completely idiotic like the recording industry. And I see the evidence as leaning towards the former.
Third, and finally, packaging and appearance and form still matter, and for this reason I’m not as willing as Tim to write off the value of non-reporters working for newspapers. Getting the Sunday Times on my Kindle for a buck reduces my search costs for news, and for me it’s worth that price. I’m also in love with the Economist’s iPhone app, which reads the whole magazine to me on the weekend while I’m jogging. Again, that’s worth the price of admission (about $2 per week). If someone else will provide me with a weekly roundup of news from around the world combined with tempered (if cheeky) analysis read in a lovely English accent at a lower price, then please let me know where I can find it.
I don’t think that Tim’s point any my point are mutually exclusive: Tim just has more faith than I do that the legacy news gatherers and sharers are relics of a bygone era and that suitable alternatives have already revealed themselves. Ultimately, it comes down to a question of taste for the consumers of news, and the more vibrant and varied a market we can have, the better we’ll all be.
There Is No Great Stagnation in Debating Stagnation
This morning I attended the debate between Rob Atkinson and Tyler Cowen on Cowen’s much-discussed ebook The Great Stagnation, hosted by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
One of the topics discussed, though not at length, was gains in health care. The Cowenian take on this is that we’ve seen massive increased in health care spending over the previous decades with declining returns; this contrasts with huge gains in life expectancy and quality in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. We have, as Cowen concisely puts it, picked the low-hanging fruit of medical innovation.
I was reminded of this excellent story from the Washington Post in 2009 on the cost of marginal heart attack interventions over several decades. Were it to run today, it might be linked to as “The Great Stagnation is Real, Cardiac Arrythmia Edition”:
Two decades ago, a famous clinical experiment showed that if a patient in the throes of a heart attack chewed and swallowed an aspirin tablet, the risk of dying fell from 13.2 percent to 10.2 percent.
If progress since then had come so cheap and easy — a 23 percent improvement for an investment of three cents — health care in the United States wouldn’t be in the state it is.
But that’s not how things happened.
Instead, the fight against heart disease has been slow and incremental. It’s also been extremely expensive and wildly successful.
In the 1960s, the chance of dying in the days immediately after a heart attack was 30 to 40 percent. In 1975, it was 27 percent. In 1984, it was 19 percent. In 1994, it was about 10 percent. Today, it’s about 6 percent.
Over the same period, the charges for treating a heart attack marched steadily upward, from about $5,700 in 1977 to $54,400 in 2007 (without adjusting for inflation).
The treatment of coronary heart disease — of which heart attack, or acute myocardial infarction, is the most significant component — this year will cost about $93 billion. It’s a huge contributor to the $2.3 trillion annual bill for medical care in the United States. Cardiovascular disease is responsible for 35 percent of deaths in America and has been the leading cause of death every year since 1900, except 1918, the year of the Spanish flu epidemic.
The evolution of heart attack treatment over the past three decades is a story of doing more things to more people at greater expense with better results. It is a portrait in miniature of medicine in the United States.
Although inappropriate care, high administrative costs, inflated prices and fraud all add to the country’s gigantic medical bill, the biggest driver of the upward curve of health spending has been the discovery of new and better things to do when someone gets sick.
“Money matters in health care as it does in few other industries,” wrote Harvard University health economist David Cutler in 2004. “Where we have spent a lot, we have received a lot in return.”
A great deal of the debate centered around measurement and teasing out the secular trends from statistical aberrations. (Starring in much of this were zero marginal productivity workers, who were not mentioned by name.) In the case of health care, this is really important, and Cowen points out that government and health care expenditures are wrapped into measured GDP at cost, which probably overstates their true effect on wealth creation. (And this goes to a larger point about the weakness of GDP measures in getting to underlying discussions of societal progress, for instance after natural disasters where wealth is destroyed making societies indisputably worse-off, but GDP can be up as a statistical artifact.)
Measurement is an important discussion, but it misses Cowen’s big, underlying points: no matter how measured, the rapid and life-altering innovations that occurred before 1973 simply haven’t been seen since. My grandfather went to medical school before penicillin had been discovered, when kids got polio and pertussis. My generation got smartphones. And to the extent we’re still seeing big, pathbreaking discoveries (which Atkinson argues) in information and communications technologies, the gains from these are not greatly affecting the median American household.
Quick thoughts on the NYT paywall
Quick thoughts on the New York Times paywall that’s generating so much ennui in the Twitterverse:
- Most of the complaints seem to be motivated by status quo bias. People paid for newspaper subscriptions for decades; then in the last few years we started getting the same deal for free over the Internet. Now we’re being asked to pay again. The last few years are an aberration, kind of a free trial period. The question has always been how to monetize news in the Internet era, not whether to do so. Whether it was distribution costs of paper or otherwise should be irrelevant from the perspective of the consumer. The relevant question is: do I value paying X dollars per month for a subscription? As paperboys were replaced with more efficient forms of delivery (guys in cars), we didn’t expect rates to fall, nor should we have. It’s not a perfectly competitive market. The relevant question is whether you value the Times‘ content by their asking price, not how the Sulzbergers make their bones.
- There’s no reason to expect newspapers at marginal cost. Indeed, it would be great to make news collection and analysis profitable again. Profit incentives drive investment, competition, and improvement. If the Times (and WSJ and FT and others) can charge for their services and make money, more power to them. The effect may well be to encourage innovation and competition in the news industry. Imagine if America had a dozen world-class daily newspapers and well-compensated professional journalists doing in-depth reporting from across the globe. We’re only likely to get this from vigorous, profit-driven competition.
- Relatedly, saying “advertising” in response to the previous point strikes me as a bit of hand-waving, like libertarians glibly saying, “oh, the market will fix it!” in response to any and all complaints about anything. If advertising were a silver bullet, presumably someone would have figured out how to really make it work by now. Similarly for micropayments, foundation support, etc. This isn’t to say that subscription-based payments are the be all and end all, but they may work for now. Other forms of financial support may come out in the future. But it’s amazing how conservative people who usually have a deep-seated belief in innovation can become when faced with having to pay the piper.
- I wish Kindle content was part of the package. I still prefer to Kindle reading experience to other experiences (though I’ve not yet broken down and bought an iPad). But nothing I read on the Kindle has tied my Kindle subscription to online content. Hence my weekly paper delivery of The Economist, which pretty much goes straight into a recycling bin.
Freeze our borders, hostile and incompetent agency!
Yesterday, after an eight hour flight from Amsterdam, I landed in Washington at Dulles airport, where I proceeded to spend an hour in line to clear immigration. The reason was that, despite six international flights arriving within about an hour (according to the arrivals board that I had plenty of time to stare at), Immigrations and Customs Enforcement only had about 9 on-duty officers to process all US citizens and permanent resident.
It’s not like they didn’t have the physical capacity for more officers; about half the lanes were closed. It’s not like they didn’t know these flights were coming; Lufthansa doesn’t just say, “Hey, let’s fly an unscheduled A340 from Frankfurt to Washington this afternoon!” Afternoons are a busy time on the east coast for arrivals from Europe. This happens every day. And Dulles processed just under 3 million arriving international passengers in the last 12 months; it’s not like this is something unusual.
It’s just that ICE didn’t schedule enough people to process all these flights in a timely fashion. Whether this is due to the fact that they are incompetent or just don’t care is immaterial: the experience was terrible for everyone involved.
Which brings me to my point: I have a feeling that there is an inverse correlation between people demanding that the US “secure our borders” (meaning locking down about 7500 land miles, plus tens of thousands of sea miles) and frequency of international travel. People who have experience dealing frequently with the guardians of our sovereign borders realize the incompetence at basic issues like agent scheduling that plague the agency. It’s said that a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested; perhaps a border realist is someone who’s spent a lot of time queuing to get into his country of residence.
It’s no secret that, even as a native-born American with a blue passport, getting into the US can be a pain in the backside. I’ve waited as long as two hours to clear immigration in the US — though in the many crossings I’ve done into other countries from the Schengen Zone states to China to Ethiopia to Ecuador, I’ve never waited more than perhaps 15 minutes (excepting once when I was detained, for the whole of 20 minutes, by the UK border guards over a visa misunderstanding.)
Moreover, other countries’ immigration agents tend to be courteous and welcoming. ICE agents are hostile and intimidating. Yesterday the agent asked me how much I got paid. (I refused to answer.) Last month an ICE agent in Toronto asked me how I was getting to DC — while he was holding my boarding pass. He also demanded to see my drivers licence to let me in to US territory. Where, may I remind you, I am a citizen. This after a delayed 14 hour flight from Asia that left me 45 minutes to catch my connection. Messing with the minds of citizens just off long-haul international flights seems to be sport.
Expecting ICE to be able to lock down our borders is fatuous. They don’t seem capable of basic things like, you know, scheduling enough agents to process a known quantity of incoming planes. Their routine hostility towards Americans (and I can’t imagine with foreigners must put up with) is annoying, and their horrendous track record on everything from operating detention centers meeting basic standards of decency to actually looking at the photographs on passports, does not suggest an agency that has the willingness or capacity to lock down tens of thousands of miles of border.
I think Americans who routinely cross our border and come back are likely to understand that this is the case. And I suspect those who call for impenetrable borders have spent very little time thinking about the realities of implementing such a policy.
