Johnny The Rocket

Indeed, who would think of hiring Mark Twain or Stephen Crane? Absurd. Pandering to masses.

Miran — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 06:30:56 +0000

First, some very good news for my readers: I’m not gonna be posting here anymore! Not in the foreseeable future. Way too busy, but working on some exciting stuff. Announcements coming in a month or so (for the three of you who come to this blog and five of you who follow me on Twitter).

Which means I better make this post good. Less horrible will do.

April 29th, 2010. She makes this weird face. Dogs make a similar one upon being served a meal they don’t like. It’s not disgust, exactly. More like, utter flabbergastation. You can’t be serious. Right??

“Fiction? Short stories? In a newspaper?”

If the owner of the face could freely express her current thoughts – and she can’t, not here, not right now, because she had been, and always will be, a reporter for a reputable national paper – it would be something along the lines of: You people are fucking retarded. You can’t be serious.

But we are. Serious, not retarded. Potentially both. Doesn’t seem like an outrageous proposal, though. After all, it’s been done before, many times.

April 29th, 1863. William Randolph Hearst pops out, tastes air, cries, and is soon held by his mother (Now you know why there’s a photo of the dude starring at you, at the top of this post).

Will Hearst is born, and, observing the event from here, mere miles from where it took place, but exactly 147 years later, we almost feel like whispering: don’t do it. Stay in there. It’s not gonna be worth it.

Because, really, was it worth it?

The dude is 21. Writes an incredibly comprehensive, intelligent proposal for saving his dad’s failing newspaper. Comprehensive = addressed everything from quality of writing to distribution methods. Intelligent = not a single empty phrase, buzzword, not a single trivial thought.

The dude takes over the paper, which his dad got in some ancient deal and never bothered to manage.

Creates the best paper on the West Coast. In a matter of months and with virtually no financial help from his family. Defeats and humiliates, in circulation and advertisement, most of the competition. Turns a profit.

Does exactly the same in New York 10 years later.

But, it’s April 29th, 2010. Google the name. Check out the journalism books, classes and blogs. Spoiled brat and lunatic. Decided to run a newspaper for fun. Power-hungry megalomaniac. Used his vast amounts of cashish to kill the competition. Lurid sensationalism. Dragged the U.S. into a war.

Nevermind that Joseph Campbell, a Professor at American University, won an award for his 2001 book, Yellow Journalism, which debunked the myth of Hearst causing wars in order to make more money.

Nevermind that trade publications of the era considered his paper the most enterprising, entertaining and exciting in New York. Praised the quality of investigative reporting and storytelling, and its devotion to public issues.

Nevermind that nothing in his paper was any different from what was found in other contemporary papers – even the conservative, stale ones. It was merely better.

Nevermind that the moral campaign launched against him – which resulted in, ironically, numerous lurid and factually-challenged biographies – was conducted by his commercial rivals. Who were publishing old, boring, conservative, snobbish and elitist papers. Losing readers, ads and money. And panicking.

April 29th, 2010. The surprised, WTF face is gone now. She only granted the fiction idea a few seconds of her time. It was, naturally, absurd. Who would think of putting fictional stories in a paper?

Indeed, who would think of hiring Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Richard Davis Harding, Ambrose Bierce, Julian Hawthorne or Jack London to write short stories for you. Or do actual journalistic, non-fiction pieces. Which they all did for Hearst.

But, of course, it’s sensational. Pandering to the masses. Using cheap tricks to sell copies and make money. Just like the usage of visual tools to tell a story.

When first penny presses appeared, the masturbators said they were sensational, tasteless and cheap. Then the first generation of popular dailies appeared in 1860s. Those who started the penny presses were now the masturbators. And when Pulitzer and Hearst appeared, the 1860s folks were the masturbators.

So, 147 years after the birth of one of this post’s protagonists, what has changed?

Masturbators still bashing the new folks. Nick Denton seems a favorite these days. Of course. He makes money and runs a new kind of a media business. Flexible, fast and daring. But we don’t like that. In our own insecurity, it’s easier to be cynical. Bash away.

What I don’t see are the Mark Twains and Stephen Cranes. In fact, the idea is absurd. Shocking. Causes flabbergastation. Wait, we are still debating why newspaper circulation has been going down? Really?

P.S. A wise man once told me, well, it was actually today, but that doesn’t sound as good, right?, anyway, this man, he uttered the greatest truism for any journalistic or communication genre. He said: if it ain’t popular, it’s crap.

Amen. It’s definitely not the other way around. And, yes, exceptions naturally apply. Rarely.

Spotted in the Palo Alto iPad crowd! Tired and frozen.

Miran — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 03:01:49 +0000

The editor of a Croatian weekly, Globus, spotted me in an AP photo of the iPad launch. As my comrade @vukradic pointed out, I’m the only one not filming anything (to be fair to myself, while traditionally lazy, I was waiting for another comrade, @withdrake, to grab an iPad so I could film him).

We got the job done, you can check out the clips here: clip 1, clip 2.

P.S. I’ve written way too much about the iPad for Croatian papers & magazines. Here are some links: Globus, Jutarnji, Jutarnji again. It’s in Croatian, but can’t force myself to write another word about it.

Someone summed it up well: Yes, it’s a bigger iPhone / iPod Touch. But a swimming pool is, basically, a bigger bath. Only you can’t hold Olympic events in a bath.

This is what every newsroom should look like (well, some giant screens would be nice, too)

Miran — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 04:11:24 +0000

Forgot to post these. From my visit to the Jungle printing shop (most were featured in the Biz Tax slideshow, but don’t really look good there. Not that they’re much better here, either).

Anyhow, this is what a modern newsroom should look and feel like. Open. Raw. Wild. Organized chaos and chaotic organization. Humor. Urgency. Obviously, more computers and some big screens would help.

And, after a long day:

Stanford Digital Guru Caught In Action, Working Hard…

Miran — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 02:31:45 +0000

… not as hard as we did back in September, though. Unsuspecting model: Drake Martinet. The photo was actually taken back in October, but I’ve been too lazy to post it. Injustice undone.

My iTunes (5): Rock Me Mama, sayeth Bob Dylan

Miran — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:53:28 +0000

First heard this on Peco’s Blues, a bootleg collection of Dylan’s unreleased recordings for the Pat Garret and Billy The Kid sountrack. One of my favorite westerns ever, by the way.

Always assumed it was an old folk song, was sure I had heard it somewhere before. Well, turns out, it’s Dylan’s original song, later converted into a song (...) Continue reading.

Hundreds of thousands pre-orders. Kindle, WSJ, magazines, comics, games (as well as this blog). It’s coming. Soon.

Miran — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 03:32:12 +0000

Our hands will be holding the iPad 5 months, 1 day, 2 hours, 22 minutes, 35 seconds ago. About 500,000 sold so far. A million expected by mid April. Faster than the original iPhone, not to mention Nexus One.

Magazines are preparing their applications. Newspapers, too. Some are even selling ad space in their apps already – before a single customer has seen the thing.

Yes, I’m a shameless fanboy now. Eagerly awaiting for the tablet. A far cry from my original post on it. As usual, Apple was ahead of us, and it took a few weeks to catch up.

The lack of a camera doesn’t matter. It would – and will – be nice, but that’s not the point. The lack of Flash doesn’t matter. It would – but won’t – be nice, but that’s not the point. A camera will come, and Flash will evenually be replaced by HTML5. Nor is the point, as Bill Gates claims, that the iPad needs a stylus and a keyboard.

In fact, Mr Gates, the whole idea of the iPad is NOT having a stylus and a keyboard.

If you think about it, if you really think about it, laptops are fundamentally imbecilic. They’re mobile, which is great, and you can carry them from home to work, classroom to commoon room, bathroom to bedroom. But in order to use them, you gotta find a table, or risk burning your legs.

Watching a movie in bed on a laptop? Brutally inconvenient, especially if you wanna turn. Showing the summer photos to your guests? Takes a while, hard to navigate. Reading a book? L’impossible.

Not to mention things like playing some quick games, checking your eBay bid status, locating food delivery options in your area, reading a comic… they are all, for the most part, possible on a laptop, of course. But it takes time and is not terribly convenient.

In short: unless you’re coding, laying something out or editing video, you don’t need a full-blown laptop. And if you’re serious about video or design, you’ll probably go for a desktop computer anyway. Now, of course, it’s up to the contet-makers and services to come up with apps. Exciting news: Instapaper is coming soon. So is Amazon’s Kindle app, as well as Barnes & Noble.

It’s coming. Soon.

Some quotes on the iPad and tablets:

I love it.

Rupert Murdoch

This is the iPhone moving into the living room.

Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous

Anyway, do you really think saving newspapers is just a matter of putting your old crap on a new device? Because from what I can see, The New York Times sucks just as bad on a Kindle as it does on paper. That, in fact, is the real problem with The New York Times: It sucks, and everyone knows it, except, apparently, the dumb fucks who write for The New York Times, which is, oddly enough, the heart of the problem. Quod erat demonstrandum, as Socrates once said.

Fake Steve Jobs, Not Apple

My guess is that the truly revolutionary content is not going to come from the old-guard publishers. It’s going to come from new guys, kids who have grown up digital. This notion of mashing together elements comes naturally to them. And somewhere out there, a genius is waiting to be discovered — the Orson Welles of digital media, someone who will create an entirely new language for storytelling.

Fake Steve Jobs, Not Apple

My instinct says this is the kind of device you don’t understand until you’ve held it and used it … I see it as way more than an e-reader that brings books to life. It’s a people’s computer.

Tim Westergren, online radio service Pandora

South Park and Jon Stewart are funny, entertaining, provocative and smart. Everything our newspapers are not.

Miran — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 04:56:17 +0000

South Park is brilliant. Their latest episode, the premiere of season 14, was exactly what the creators promised it would be: based on Tiger Woods, but not really about Tiger. They pulled it off.

Here’s the thing: yes, it was morbidly funny. Hysterical, even. More than that, though, it was smart. Provocative. Thought-provoking. Unexpected. The episode, aptly titled “Sexual Healing”, was the best piece of writing on the whole Tiger Woods saga, managing to escape the trivial standpoints that dominated most media commentaries.

It doesn’t go for the elitist and imbecilic “Oh, but why would anyone want to read about that?” point. Come on, a global superstar, world’s best golfer, gets chased off and beaten up by his wife, only to have about 20 different ladies, porn stars included, confess their affairs with the man. That’s pretty damn interesting and funny.

Nor does it resort to the equally moronic, and highly hypocritical, bashing of a rich celebrity, because, you know, they’re all the same bla bla bla. It finds a way to tell the Tiger story by addressing the only truly important thing – ourselves, and our reaction to it.

South Park is brilliant, original, compelling and smart. Everything our newspapers are not. Watching this week’s episode, or pretty much anything Jon Stewart has been doing lately, the only conclusion is: we can’t compete. No sane person would pick up a copy of a product that offers dry prose with expected conclusions, no humor and less intelligence than a comedy show.

The iPad tanks. The iPad doesn’t tank. Kindle 3 ends up saving publishers. Kindle 3 doesn’t end up saving publishers. DOESN’T MATTER. Screw context. The only thing that will kill – is killing – newspapers is that they are not shocking, surprising, engaging their readers on a daily basis.

People say Jon Stewart and South Park are pure entertainment. With those amounts of humor, brilliance and original thought, I say, screw the news. Give me entertainment.

The bot turns towards me and says, “Hello, Miran. Wired is awesome.” Hi, bot!

Miran — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 04:15:36 +0000

Met up with Tim Heath and Ryan Hickman, local hackers who built Truckbot – a moving (and talking) bot controlled by an Android phone. Ryan and Tim met up through Hacker Dojo, a Mountain View, CA hackerspace, and built the thing from scratch. Pretty cool!

I also did a story on Truckbot’s current and potential abilities for Wired.com’s Gadget Lab. Read the whole article (...) Continue reading.

Talking innovation with Prof. Rohan: “My ventures have been successful because I always do an incredible amount of research”

Miran — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 04:02:11 +0000

Prof. Dennis Rohan On Innovation from Miran Pavic on Vimeo.

Did an interview with Prof. Dennis Rohan from Stanford’s Business School. He started and led seven different companies, and now teaches a class on innovation and entrepreneurship.

WSJ vs. NYT: Why the upcoming newspapers war will be exciting. And good for the readers!

Miran — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 08:33:14 +0000

‘Project Amsterdam’. According to New York Magazine’s piece on Rupert Murdoch, that’s the name of his $15-million secret plan to defeat The New York Times. A very Bond villain-like name.

Next month, if all goes according to plan, the Journal will launch an eight-to-sixteen-page metropolitan section that will directly challenge the paper of record on its home turf.

This is fascinating. For the first time in decades, if not a whole century, we might have a full-blown newspaper / media war in New York, between true giants. This is good. First of all, it’s fun and exciting. Secondly, it might prove to be good for the readers, and U.S. daily journalism in general.

According to the NY Mag piece, Robert Thomson, the former FT and London Times editor whom Murdoch installed to run the Journal in May 2008, shares the belief that American journalism in general, and the New York Times in particular, is hidebound and decadent.

Shortly after the Journal deal closed in December 2007, Murdoch appeared before “shell-shocked staff, standing on a stack of printer paper like a general addressing a vanquished army.”

“The message was clear,” one reporter in the room remembers. “It was: ‘You’re a bunch of lazy, self-important, past-their-prime journalists.’ ”

Thomson’s shares this view. And, as much as it pains me to say that, it’s pretty spot-on. A lot of digital outlets are faster, smater, more interesting, aggressive and innovative. They simply offer better journalism – in the ever-changing definition of the word.

And the old dinosaurs will always seek conjure the old cloak of “quality journalism”, “watchdog newspaper”, “media that matters” etc., which is an extremely self-serving moralism. And a defeatist excuse. Oh, sure, *I* could absolutely do that. Much better than the other guy, in fact. If I wanted to. But I don’t. It’s way below my level.

Inner, and outter, monologues like this used to be reserved for high schools and teenage boys who failed to win over their love interests.

The weird thing about this is that there is still a bunch of fabolous American journalism in numerous magazines and books. It’s compelling, interesting and dramatic. It favors good stories over general topics editors feel are important. And it’s close to the reader.

If WSJ can offer a compelling alternative to what it means to be a quality daily in the U.S. today, if it can create something both popular and unconventional, smart and interesting – it would be a major victory for daily journalism here.

Here’s what WSJ’s boss Thomson told the NY Mag regarding the upcoming WSJ – NYT showdown:

“There are two personnel moves at the New York Times that I think make them vulnerable. One is Mr. Sulzberger remains in place. And the second is that Howell Raines lost his job. Because whatever Howell Raines’s sins were, he was clearly a reformer. And he was prepared to confront the journalistic elite at the paper and bring the New York Times into the modern ages. That process really stopped when Howell left.”

Think what you will about Murdoch. The fact remains, as Juan Antonio Giner noted, that he is still willing to invest incredible amounts of money into newspapers and journalism. Unlike almost everyone else.

As he was taking over the WSJ, Murdoch got upset about an editorial in NYT, and sent a note to NYT’s Publisher, Sulzberger, signaling readiness to being warfare. NYT’s reponse? Rather expected for an organization that hasn’t had to deal with serious competition for decades:

The next day, Sulzberger was sitting in his office at the Times Building with Richard Beattie, the chairman of law firm Simpson Thacher, who had advised the Dow Jones board during the Journal deal. Sulzberger pulled out Murdoch’s note. “He was laughing at the time,” Beattie told me. “He thought it was cute.” Sulzberger never replied to Murdoch’s letter. When I called Sulzberger to ask about the competition with the Journal, he dismissed my question out of hand: “Whatever,” he said.

Whatever, sayeth Mr Sulzberger. Grab some popcorn, sayeth I. Let the games begin.