Category: Media

Which revolution is being televised?

As to be expected, I am glued to my laptop at the moment following the developments of the situation in Egypt. What strikes me is the communicational difference to the situation in Iran 2009: With the Internet (mostly) shut down, Al Jazeera, as well as news agencies AP and Reuters, are nearly the sole source of information.

Naturally, corporate foreign news organisations are confined to major urban centers, in the case of Al Jazeera (resp. Al Jazeera English) Cairo, Alexandria and Suez. And following numerous attacks on their reporters, they are even restricted to their own offices. The revolution is being televised – but which revolution does the television show?

Since the Internet and mobile network shutdown, news from rural areas have all but vanished from international reports. Commentators have repeatedly stressed that the uprise in Egypt is exceptional for happening all over the country, but whatever is happening outside the urban centers right now – it goes unnoticed. I.e., for the international audience it effectively does not take place.1

In a short digression, it’s also noteworthy that there are now news that Al Jazeera Arabic was taken off air a couple of minutes ago. The most important news source for Egyptians first on the revolution in Tunesia and then on the developments in their own country is thus no longer available. Alaa Abdel Fattah, Egyptian superblogger and longtime opposition activist, has pointed out the impact of supranational media in the Guardian: “From the internet and satellite TV a new pan-Arabism is born.”

It’s a close call to compare this situation to the much talked-about role of social media during the “green revolution” in Iran one and a half years ago. What is noteworthy is that Blogs, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter diversified the range of news sources – I might just point to the videos of the death Neda Agha-Soltan, which were spread over the Internet. While apparently not relevant to the organisation of protest, Twitter and other social media certainly changed the portrayal and perception of the “green revolution” in the West.

However, in Iran the protests never spread nationwide in the way they are now in Egypt. There were demonstrations in other major cities apart from Tehran, yet they stayed minor events in comparison to the mass rallies in the capital. Most notably, I barely found (English-language) sources on the ongoings in these smaller cities. Should one conclude that the Internet doesn’t make reporting on uprisings (spatially) more diverse?

The recent developments in Tunesia seem to go counter such an analysis. Sure, the situation there went unnoticed by a broader (Western – it was amplified powerfully by Al Jazeera in the Arab world) audience; but social media such as movie-sharing platforms were used from the beginning to spread news about the uprising from the beginning.

The Internet enables us to get informed on the ongoings in any place connected to the network, however remote it might otherwise be. Egypt’s Internet shutdown has effectively narrowed down our perspective to the angles of Al Jazeera’s television cameras. Does that change civil resistance? Being skeptical about media’s role in these in general, I am not sure. But it is certainly an issue to watch as events unfold.

  1. Just as I am writing this, Al Jazeera English is interviewing somebody from Bani Suwaif. So it seems they are, after all, able to create connections to more remote places. [↩]

Print ads

It’s been a while since I had a paper magazine in my hands – my last subscription ended two years ago, and occasional train station purchases tend to go to the shelves unread -; but maybe I was just unprepared for an American publication, where advertisement might be more prevalent than in Europe (in TV, at least, it is).

Today I pulled out a paper copy of Wired at my college library. The cover promised an interesting article, so I turned to the inside to look for the table of contents; it’s on page 13 (before that, only advertising). However, my article was listed on the second part of the table, page 16 (more advertising in between). Wired doesn’t give page numbers for small pieces, so I had to find it in its section (40 pages, at least half of which are adverts). In the end, I spent more time looking for the article – a small 10-liner – than actually reading it.

Imagine a website which treats its readers like this: The start page announces an article, but a link first leads you to a page with the table of contents. However, you have to scroll down over several big adverts to find the link to your article, which turns out to link to another long page, where you have to scroll down some more times to finally read a few sentences.

Who, really, would do that?

Flattr – the second month

I had a post on Flattr revenues in May, complete with some quotes summarizing early reactions by German bloggers. Since the post got quite some appreciation, here’s another one, this time with revenues of a whole month (June). Again I’m using Rivva’s “Leitmedien” index as a means of measuring medias’ importance within the German-speaking blogosphere.

Carta editors: “Flattr revenues in June: Thank you!”
201,22 € for group blog Carta (#6 on Rivva)

Flattr seems to be on its way to become a convincing business model for blogs.

Carta also has a post up with German Flattr charts for June, listing the most-flattred articles over the last month, saying:

Among the most-flattred topics in June were among others: Flattr, football, media critique, related rights ["Leistungsschutzrecht"]. Comparing the amount of flattr clicks with the previous month one can barely see a difference. The amount of clicks on top articles has only slightly increased. This means the growth of Flattr has decreased in June. The first Flattr hype seems over.

Markus Beckedahl: Flattr revenues in June
576,53 € for group blog netzpolitik.org (#7)

That’s more than I expected. We will see if it continues like this and if more Flattr users will lead to higher revenues. I am still not convinced that Flattr could refinance a blog like this in the medium term. That will need a mix of revenues, combining parameters like Flattr, advertising, donations and other stuff like giving talks.

Sebastian Heiser: Flattr earns us 998,50 Euros in June
998,50 € for newspaper taz (#15)

My personal impression from our Flattr balance in June is that readers don’t reward the most expensive investigation the most, not the best coverage and not the articles with the best background information from our specialized editors. The most rewards go to articles which aim at the favorite enemies of our readers: Neo-Nazis, high nobility, the newspaper “Bild”, the liberal-conservative federal government.

Jens Matheuszik: What Flattr earned Pottblog & Co. in June
14,48 € for blog Pottblog (#38)

There’s one thing that irks me about Flattr: I have written [...] an article which I think is very helpful for a certain audience [...]. This article, which also contained a Flattr button, also got linked to, among others by a blog with a Flattr button. Interestingly, this other blog, which actually just paraphrased my post and linked to me, got more Flattr clicks than the actual post. That’s somehow as if on pay-TV I would pay more for the preview of a good movie than for the actual movie.

Stefan Niggemeier: Now I’m flatt
352,89 for blog Stefan Niggemeier (#14)

That’s more than I expected [...]. 100 Euros for an article like my commentary on the “She said ‘Reichsparteitag’” hysteria is a better royalty than many newspapers would have paid for an article.

Some other major blogs have reported their revenues as well:

law blog (#27): 247,68 €
iPhoneBlog.de (#232): 202,10 €
Blogwerk (publisher of several blogs): 201,17 €

I myself made 7,42 € in revenues from Flattr this month through six articles on i like patterns. A post reporting revenues and reactions of German bloggers like this one got most clicks (16) – probably because it was used by Flattr as credentials. But these 16 clicks only meant 2,76 € in revenues – while two clicks for my article on the campaign against the 2011 census already earned me 2,36 €. All in all, I made 0,26 € per flattr – an average reported by others as well.

From the first full month of Flattr experience we can already draw some trends. Of course, one important question is whether Flattr continues to expand. While Carta sees the service’s grow already in a decline, I would draw a more cautious and complex conclusion by looking at the revenues reported by two of the biggest earners, netzpolitik.org and taz. Netzpolitik is read mostly by an extremely ‘Net-savvy audience, while taz.de, online version of a leftist newspaper, probably has a less specialized readership.

Netzpolitik.org reports about 577 € for June, compared to 39 € on the last two days of May, i.e. revenues stayed at about 20 Euros per day. Taz.de on the other hand made nearly 1000 € in June, whereas they had reported only 143,55 € for the previous month’s twelve final days, i.e. taz.de about tripled their revenues in June. I would argue that what we see is Flattr growing not at the core (‘Net-savvy early adopters), but on the edges (less avant-garde readership). That’s not to say that we already see a mainstreamization of Flattr, but a diversification among its users.

The other big issue is whether Flattr revenues are just. Or, to use a less moralizing phrasing: Which articles (and which topics) get flattred? The quotes above already give some answers to this question: Readers flattr opinionated commentary rather than well-researched articles. Posts dealing with flattr get a lot of reward, but this trend seems to decline. Hot topics, especially those popular with the ‘Net-savvy media avant-garde, are leading the charts.

The statistics of the articles I wrote for Spreeblick only partially mirror this image:

49 – Activists plan constitutional complaint against 2011 census (31.05.)
20 – Governors sign media protection of minors treaty (11.06.)
14 – Campaign against 2011 census launched (10.06.)
12 – On the App Store or not on the App Store, that’s the question (09.06.)
11 – An alternative to Facebook (18.05.)
9 – The digital future of Europe (19.05.)
9 – EFF design basic rights for users of Facebook and co. (20.05.)
9 – Does Burma work on nuclear weapons? (04.06.)
8 – Those writing about environmental protection live in danger (24.06.)
7 – Gallo report: A victorious battle for copyright dogmatism (02.06.)
7 – Video interview with Eleanor Saitta: Before the surveillance camera, some people are more equal (08.06.)

Another five articles got flattred six or less times, but none of the posts I wrote for Spreeblick since the introduction of Flattr did not receive any reward.

My most-flattred article deals with the upcoming 2011 census (here’s an updated English version). It required relatively much research, but was kind of scoop – I was the first to report on the planned constitutional complaint. On spots #2 and #3 follow news articles on current political affairs, two opinion pieces on Apple’s App Store and Facebook rank 4th and 5th. There is no clear pattern visible in this ranking (which is not based on sufficient data of course).

My own articles aside, opinion pieces seem to fare well with Flattr users. Many seem to use the button as kind of a way of saying thank you to authors who expressed what they were already thinking. I, personally, try to reward writers for articles which offer me an unusual perspective, new insights – or an enjoyable phrasing. How do you use the Flattr button?