The present and future of post production business and technology

So apparently some author comes up with a figure that online unauthorized distribution is costing the book publishing business $3 billion a year. (Once again repeating the totally bogus argument that each download is a lost sale but that’s for another post.) One has to question the independence of the study when the writer works for a company presenting a “solution” to the problem they identify, but let’s leave it for the moment.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. There’s another industry that costs the book publishing business $100 billion a year in lost sales: libraries. Using the same methodology as the study in the cited publisher’s weekly article above, this blogger calculates that libraries have cost publishers $1 Trillion dollars in the last decade.

So, if we’re going to solve the book “piracy” problem in a way that really helps publishers, we’ll have to close all the libraries. After all they’re costing publishers more than 30x more than any unauthorized distribution does: even if you calculate that unauthorized distribution with totally bogus methodologies.

In fact, photocopying also costs the print publishing industry billions of dollars a year, so we should regulate their use. In fact, if the RIAA/MPAA want a “three strikes” rule, then it should be applied to everything.

A three-strikes rule (as introduced in France) would mean that if an unsubstantiated assertion from a record-company-appointed “watchdog” is made against an IP address, the account would be cancelled and the user taken off the Internet. (Note: this is without judicial process; without any proof that the account holder did the download; with a system that has accused dead people of “piracy” or any other legal process we normally hold as being important before issuing punishment. At least there has to be a trial!)

So, if this is a good idea for music or movies (like they’re some “special” category) then it obviously should be carried through to protect print publishers as well.  According to “Freedom to Tinker” it would work like this:

The government sets up a registry of accused infringers. Anybody can send a complaint to the registry, asserting that someone is infringing their copyright in the print medium. If the government registry receives three complaints about a person, that person is banned for a year from using print.
As in the Internet case, the ban applies to both reading and writing, and to all uses of print, including informal ones. In short, a banned person may not write or read anything for a year.
A few naysayers may argue that print bans might be hard to enforce, and that banning communication based on mere accusations of wrongdoing raises some minor issues of due process and free speech. But if those issues don’t trouble us in the Internet setting, why should they trouble us here?
Yes, if banned from using print, some students will be unable to do their school work, some adults will face minor inconvenience in their daily lives, and a few troublemakers will not be allowed to participate in — or even listen to – political debate. Maybe they’ll think more carefully the next time, before allowing themselves to be accused of copyright infringement.
In short, a three-strikes system is just as good an idea for print as it is for the Internet. Which country will be the first to adopt it?

After all, if it’s fair to have people cut off the Internet (and their life) based on three unsupported, unproven assertions from anyone, it should apply to everything. Right? It should apply to the children of Record Company executives (who apparently only got a “talking to” from their father -wish I could find a link to that story).

This is, of course, after the RIAA and MPAA have totally failed to establish that they have had any loss from piracy. (The biggest grossing movies were mostly pirated before release from within the studio.) Study after study (sorry Adage login required) after study shows that those who download music are the biggest buyers of music, but facts have never gotten in the way of idiot assertions from these organizations.

So, either we apply “three strikes” under some reasonable regime that would require the record company or movie studio to actually do what the law requires and identify the person at the account and prove that they uploaded a file as “making available” is not established legal precedent in any jurisdiction; or we’ll allow a regime where anyone can be accused of “piracy” by any other person without proof or the need to follow established law.

Which are you going to support?

Although I attend a number of conferences a year – often as a speaker – I mostly find that they go over ground that I either already know, or have heard the panelists/speakers go over before. In fact in 2008 there was one conference that I found extremely valuable – The Conversation organized in part by Scott Kirsner, who’s CinemaTech blog should be on everyone’s reading list.

So, naturally when Scott teamed with Peter Broderick on the Distribution U conference I signed up immediately. The conferences, held last Saturday, Nov 7, was a one day overview and summary of what people are doing to promote their independent films. While my primary interest is in the (as yet undeveloped) field of “independent television”, there were a lot of lessons from Distribution U (link is to Scott’s wrap up).

For me, the concentrated day helped me consolidate a lot of the thinking I’ve been doing on distribution over the last 3 or so years and helps me build on some of the thoughts I’ve been sharing via the (free) Supermeet 2009 magazine (How to grow an audience for your independent project) and via sessions at Digital Video Expo and other places.

Trying to summarize my eight pages of notes (a new conference record for me).

Scott Kirsner’s “scene setting” session started by pointing out how all technology innovation is immediately rejected by “the established players” – Edison hated projected film because he feared (accurately) that it would kill his profitable Kinescope business. We still see this happening today. His primary point is that “participation and engagement” with audiences is a crucial tenet of modern audience building – a term I prefer over “distribution”.

Another primary theme, from both Scott and Peter, is that the distribution for every project will be different, because the primary (or starting) audience will be different and what attracts one audience will not attract another. In modern distribution the “primary” audience for any project is one that is already engaged, in some way, by the topic or content. That helps get word-of-mouth buzz going and the audience can spread. Targeting a specific audience is easier (and cheaper) than trying to build a generic audience.

Another primary theme is that revenue comes from all sorts of places, not just “traditional” ones. A revenue mix seems to be the new normal for independent projects.

For example, the audience (and revenue) for Brian Terwilliger’s One Six Right has come from pilots, because the film is really about the romance of flying small planes and should appeal to every pilot in America. One Six Right has made money: (corrected after comment from Scott Kirsner)

• selling DVDs directly (9,000 in the first 9 days it was available);
• selling the soundtrack on CD (30% who buy the DVD also buy the CD of music unknown other than in the documentary);
• selling posters signed by the 24 year old filmmaker (so far $30,000 from sale of posters)
• listing (and selling) the DVD and merchandise through a catalog for pilots (Sporties);
• selling through Amazon (where apparently the tip is to keep supply to Amazon low, which keeps them from deep discounts and keeps the sale price high);
• selling a calendar (people pay to have the project’s promotion on their walls);
• deals with local general aviation airports for local premiere’s;
• giving the show to public television while retaining 4 x 15 second spots before and after the show to promote the DVD and merchandise;
• creating a half hour “making of” special that builds the documentary out to a 2 hour or 90 minute package and selling that to Discovery channel. This sale apparently covered the original budget, on top of all the income from all the other revenue-generating activities, which is substantial.

I don’t know the budget for 161 right but some quick math shows that the initial DVD sales and calendar sales account for about $210,000 in revenue alone.

In fact, engagement with the audience starts at the very beginning of the project, rather than after production is complete: build an audience as you build the project and neither is more important than the other. Starting early builds an audience for the project and it builds anticipation.

Peter Broderick focused on “Hybrid Distribution” – don’t throw out all the “old” methods but adapt them and slice up the rights to the filmmaker’s best advantage. Never give anyone more rights than they need, and always retain direct sale rights for DVD and digital downloads. Although Peter gave a lot more examples at the seminar, his 10 Principles of Hybrid Distribution article provides an excellent overview.

I really appreciated the depth of examples that Scott and Peter provided, and the willingness to “talk numbers”. In most cases we got specific examples of the revenue from each type of activity surrounding the production.

Scott Kirsner will be speaking on “Building Big Audiences and Generating Revenue in the Digital Age” in San Francisco on Tuesday Dec 1 and I recommend you go if you have any interest in the subject – it’s based on his book Fans, Friends, and Followers (my copy is on the way and I’m looking forward to reading it).

I think this quote from Lisa Seward of Mod Communications summarizes the changes best:

You used to use your budget to buy an audience. Now you have to invent ideas to attract an audience.

The quote comes from an excellent presentation, referenced by myself and Larry Jordan already, The Audience is always right.

In The New Now I made the point that, whatever your promise in business, that you’d better be able to keep it, because when you make a promise or offer and don’t keep it, you usually do more damage to your brand than if you’d never made offer in the first place. By way of example, here’s my experience from this last week and how a company that I had fairly neutral feelings toward has turned me completely against the company, simply because they failed to follow through on a promise – a promise they didn’t have to make, but did.

Last Monday, Oct 26th TV Pro Gear sent out their regular newsletter (which I signed up for) with an offer for a free entry to the SMPTE show exhibition last week. I duly signed up for that free entry, figuring I’ll go if it’s free (normally $25).

I heard nothing Monday, nor the next day. So now I’m feeling like TV Pro Gear has let me down, particularly since there was no email or any follow up other than an acknowledgement that I had successfully filled out the form.

When I finally rang I was told (by their receptionist “Crystal”) that “Oh yeah, something happened and we couldn’t do that”. There was nobody else there to find out what had gone wrong and the only “solution” would be for me to go down to the show (and pay $25 for an exhibition of unknown quality). Crystal promised to take my number and someone would get back to me. I also sent an email to their general contact address asking what had gone wrong and requesting both an explanation and an apology.

No email and no phone call a week later, I decided to call. First call gets dropped by the receptionist; second call I get put through to “Bill”. Bill declined to tell me what went wrong and why I wasn’t contacted by phone or email. Basically, the company apparently simply doesn’t care about potential customers or their public reputation or they expect a simply “we’re sorry” – without explanation – to be enough. Bill, that is NOT enough!

Let me be clear: making promises to your customers (or readers of your newsletter) that you cannot or do not follow through on is very bad for your reputation. It certainly makes me think I’d never buy anything there because, how would I know what is true and what they are just saying to get me in, like the false promise in the email newsletter.

So, be very careful when you make promises: you better have the resources to follow through or you damn well shouldn’t make the promise because it will just backfire on you. Like this has.

Deal with TV Pro Gear, Flower Street Glendale at your own risk. It seems to me they don’t care. Of course, they could care, but simply not be competent enough to deliver.

There are lots of great Value Added Resellers in Los Angeles (Keycode, Advantage Video, New Media Hollywood come to mind immediately), deal with them and make a note to not create a disaster for yourself when you make an offer or promise.

On last night’s Digital Production BuZZ, host Larry Jordan quizzed me on why I thought advertising was doomed and what would replace it.  I’m including the 6 minute interview here because it extends the thinking in my previous post on What will replace advertising? from a couple of days ago.

Philip Hodgetts on how branded media will replace advertising.

Update: Larry Jordan continues the conversation with his post: Where Are All the Ad Dollars Going.

Over the last two years I’ve been thinking extensively, and speaking on, about funding new media. (Want me to come speak on the subject at your group – email me!) It’s become increasingly obvious that advertising probably isn’t the way the majority of media will be funded in the future.

In the (relatively brief) period of mass media – Television, newspapers, magazine and radio – the publisher or license holder built an audience and then sold that audience to advertisers to push unrelated products and services to the audience who mostly didn’t care. With 70% of Americans desirous of paying to avoid advertising (counting me among them) you have to wonder how long the tedium of irrelevant advertising will be tolerated by audiences.

Even the web is a horrible experience unless you are smart enough to enable ad blocking and Click2Flash (Flash blocking in webkit displays system wide – OS X only afaik). With those two add-ons enabled the web doesn’t burn my eyes with the pain of flashing, jumping, irritating distractions. If my failure to ruin my experience of a site by blocking the ad sends the site off the net, so be it. I didn’t ask for the advertising.

Technically, of course, it’s not all advertising that’s horrible, just irrelevant advertising. Like watching a 45 minute show on Hulu and seeing the same fabric softener ad five times!!!! And Hulu has the temerity to complain that I’m using ad blocking! People don’t really mind relevant advertising, but so little of it is! In fact, for me about 99.9% of advertising is irrelevant. In maybe 200-300 hours of in-car listening to KNX1070 (LA News radio) I’ve heard one ad that was relevant (Windscreen chip repair). That is the only ad that doesn’t carpet KNX wall to wall! (Figures!)

So, I have a fairly hard-and-fast rule that I don’t buy from anyone who advertises to me. Send me junk mail, go out of my purchase consideration list.

Anyhow, I’m not alone. Not only is advertising losing its effectiveness, it turns people off (and yes, I have references for every assertion I make, I just don’t want to clutter the blog) and that’s just not going to be a way to build an audience.

But there’s a much bigger problem. There’s not enough advertising for any “new media” and “old media” is losing advertising support in dramatic amounts.

But most relevant of all. Advertising in someone else’s show makes no sense. The biggest advertising brands would be much better off with branded entertainment, where they would pay for the content and integrate the advertising. American Academic Mark Pesce, now at the Australian Film, TV and Radio School, coined the term “Hyperdistribution” where a single sponsor integrates ads relevant to the show’s audience and in the style of the show, and then it’s distributed anywhere and everywhere it can be. P2P and Bittorrent distribution is welcomed!

My friend Cirina Catania worked on a very successful series of branded media (online video) for Chivas Regal and I believe that this is the direction of the future: useful, interesting content that is, in some way, relevant to the brand and hooked back to the brand. Why torture audiences with irrelevant advertising when you can entertain them and still get the brand message across in a relevant way?

I’m clearly not the only one that thinks this. I recently found a great presentation called (correctly) The Audience is always right. Check it out and then make a comment.

As I transition into a role I never thought I’d have – software product manager/developer – I’ve come to love “pushy clients”! Although I don’t write the code for our products, I’m usually involved in the design and particularly user interface. Greg writes the code rather brilliantly.

Our first piece of software – driven by a strong idea of mine – is First Cuts - the assisted editing tool for long form documentary filmmakers. Finisher was the suggestion of Loren Miller during the beta period, and the use of Sequence Markers to force b-roll was the suggestion of Digital Production BuZZ producer, Cirina Catania.

The work we did there gave us a leg-up with FCP XML so when Ted Schilowitz of RED Digital Cinema asked if we knew someone who could, basically, create something functionally similar to Avid’s Autosync (part of Media Composer) for Final Cut Pro users, leading to Sync-N-Link a few months later.

Later than intended because we were about ready to release it and ran the concept past Jim Mathers of the Digital Cinema Society and he said that in the independent markets that he works in, editors tend to sync multi-track (dual system) audio after the edit. Dang a delay but Greg made it happen. That’s something you can’t do with Media Composer.

If, however, you compare Sync-N-Link then with the current version – set for a substantial update shortly – there have been so many new features added, and bugs fixed, that we could not have found without our early customers. We did try beta testing but found that few beta testers have time to put into testing, despite their best intentions. (Which reminds me, “sorry Boris for not much feedback the last two times I tested for you”.)

Likewise, the whole Sequence Clip Reporter application came about because I had demonstrated miniME and exceLogger at LAFCPUG. A friend said “what you really should do…” and we did. Then we had some great feedback from (yes) a beta tester and fabulous feedback from an early customer, who was “I love it but could it also….” and now it does.

Sequence Clip Reporter was only released about seven weeks ago, and yet it’s now at version 1.5, with an interface overhaul (more feedback) and a raft of new, customer-driven features.

So, if you use a piece of software and have a feature request, let people know. Everyone who develops software loves to know how people use it and how they can make it better – yes, even Apple, although they’ll never tell you. (Someone reads, categorizes and files every feature request and bug report.) In fact, FCP XML v5 has a bug fix for a problem Greg reported (from a customer) and a new feature that also came about because we couldn’t accommodate a feature request from a customer. (Sound reel was not being exported in the XML until V5.) So we know Apple do respond.

What I particularly enjoy is that we’re not a big company, where it takes time to iterate a new version, QA it and get it out. And thankfully none of our applications are (yet) anywhere near as complex as the simplest Pro App or NLE. It’s just so great to get a feature request from a (potential) customer and have the first (very rough) draft of the app by the next day. (There’s a huge gap between that working prototype and a full application, not all of which is to do with the function of the app.)

Or get a feature request from a customer – or a problem they have – and being able to push out an update for everyone within a day or two days. Or even solve a problem that isn’t caused by out software, but where Greg’s XML expertise is able to “save the day”.

So, provide that feedback. Tell people how you use their software (tell us for sure). It’s likely to gain you a feature, or even a whole application.

Just lately I’ve been dealing with a content aggregation site (or two) that had articles from this blog listed in their articles directory. Worse still is that the site is designed to distribute articles to other sites. I don’t mind the idea: if a writer wants wider distribution, then it probably makes sense to syndicate the article there, than have it sit in obscurity.

I had to fight fairly hard to get my articles out of their system because I had not put them in that system and didn’t want the articles syndicated wildly. Now I do have some syndication organized (if you’re reading this on Toolfarm, thanks) but I don’t want this content distributed anywhere I haven’t directly authorized.

The articles were removed but only after I re-served the DMCA takedown notice on the owner of the domain name, as the normal site admins were not acting in according with the provisions of a DMCA Takedown notice. (I actually thought I’d have trouble when I realized, from the domain registration, that the company was actually in Israel, which isn’t actually covered by US Copyright law! Fortunately they did the right thing.)

We were talking about this over dinner and I realized I had a double standard going on. Not necessarily a bad thing but any internal inconsistency is alway s worth examining.

I was remarking that I am fairly certain there’s at least one school or college that’s using my HD Survival Handbook as a class text, which is not exactly being used in accordance with a single-user license that is the normal purchase. (BTW, we’re always happy to do very attractive bulk pricing for anyone that wants to reuse in a school or commercial organization, as we did recently.) But the thing is I wasn’t particularly upset by it. Sure, I would prefer that they made an arrangement with us for official distribution, but the thing is, I didn’t have any proof that they were doing something wrong. There may be a way that just the teach uses the work as a reference.

If I had actual proof put in my face – such as a student saying that the HD Survival Handbook was actually on a student-accessible server at her college – I would have to act. (In that case I sent a nice email to the original purchaser at that college stating what the student had said and he immediately made it right.) When I say “have to act” I actually mean it. Should an author not act on flagrant breach of the licensing conditions, there are circumstances where the author can lose the copyright exclusivity.

So I was struck with my apparent double standard. I am less worried about meticulously keeping the commercial writings only to those who purchased, than I am about these thoughts being widespread.  Partly that was because the instance with the aggregation site did not have link-backs to this site – the uploader had substituted links to their site, and the content was misused – wrong tags and confusing descriptions. My name even appeared on an article I didn’t write! But it’s also because a lot of what I write here are the beginnings of my thinking about something, or they’re going to be (or have come from) commercial writings.

Mostly, I think, it’s because the commercial products were written to be distributed widely. Plus, if there is a whole class or two that are using my work as their textbook, I’m still being compensated with reputation building. I’m not unhappy with the thought that a whole generation of student will grow up thinking that I provide accurate, understandable and useful information. I figure that will lead to some compensation some day. The portion that does pay for the downloads, and I like to think that’s the majority, make the project well and truly worthwhile, and frankly, I don’t think those students would have paid anyway! Whatever money a student has should be kept for the truly important things…

Here though, I’m writing as much to clear my thinking or have a record of something I’m fired-up about as anything. I don’t have advertising on the site and don’t expect it will be a commercial return. I do hope that it’s reputation building, and when you reproduce this work without authorization, you’re taking my reputation and using it for your own purposes. And I don’t like that.

PS

What I consider highly appropriate is to make reference to a post, summarize the main points – perhaps quote a paragraph or two – and then link to the permalink for the article here. (Click on the article headline and the URL will be the permanent link.) That type of use is a compliment.

I have to say I was horrified to read that Ryan Seacrest was getting $15 million a year to host American Idol. To host, not produce, not to book a studio, not to actually produce anything but to host. To read a teleprompter and walk without falling over.

I’ve never met Mr Seacrest and I have no personal animosity but $15 million  a year to host a talent show seems just wrong. Way out of balance with anything real.  This is a 3x increase in salary over what he’s been getting – $5 million a year – for the same job.

That same amount of money would produce six episodes of Mad Men including paying all the far more talented cast (hey, they can act); paying the crew; locations; editors; facilities and presumably profit for the producers. All instead of paying one person to turn up.

I cannot believe that any one person brings that much value to a show. It just seems way out of balance to anything reasonable and human and really, tells me why the whole industry needs to be made over anew.

Equally stomach churning are the  sums paid to the CEOs of the major media companies, even when the results they turn in are “disappointing” to say the least.  Disney CEO Robert Iger earned $30.6 million last year while presiding over a 26% drop in profit at Disney? Where is the shareholder revolt? Why are they not demanding an $8 million drop in salary package?

It’s not just Iger; the rest of the crowd of losing value media company heads are all paid outrageous sums of money for the value they (don’t) bring to the companies they head.

Here’s my solution. Set a limit to the maximum ratio the highest and lowest paid employees of a company can earn. You want to increase the CEO salary, then everyone’s salary goes up to share in the (obviously great) results. Set the ratio at 100:1 if you like, but set a ratio that cannot be broken.

Until there’s some sanity I’ll be putting my efforts into demolishing that industry to start over afresh.

Over at Techdirt, Mike Masnick wrote an interesting article suggesting that copyright on “art or music” may be unconstitutional. Now, I don’t expect the Supreme Court to rule that way any time soon – there’s not even a case before them – but it did make me wonder what would be different if copyright didn’t exist on film, television, music, architecture and other creative arts.

I thoroughly recommend reading Mike’s article, but the gist of the argument is that the Constitution provides for a “Limited Period” (originally 14 years, not 50 years past the death of the author) for “authors” (only, no descendants or corporate owners) “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”. Useful Arts apparently being the business of invention in the language of the day. No mention of almost all our current copyright system.

We wouldn’t have the RIAA suing its best customers. The RIAA, MPAA and their kind around the world would have to work out how to compete, which is simple: provide a good product at a fair price and provide it conveniently. Without the crutch of copyright to protect a dying business model (and a highly profitable one, so it’s understandable they don’t want to adjust to the new reality) they would have to compete.

After all, television has been giving its content away pretty much since day one. Of course others (advertisers) pay for the privilege of interrupting the program with something irrelevant, which is why I’d rather pay a fair amount for my ad free copies, thanks.

If there was no copyright, then digital copies would abound, and content creators would either have to add value to their official (paid) version; or bundle advertising so closely with the show that it doesn’t appear like advertising. (In fact I believe the future of advertising is branded media, but that’s a post for another day.)

Of course, it can be done. iTunes and Amazon’s music store sell music that is fairly readily available via various P2P mechanisms. Every one of the 4 Billion songs Apple has sold has been available free.

Perhaps content could be free after a period of time, and people will pay for immediacy. This is the strategy the Direct TV hoped would give them more customers by showing Friday Night Lights on Direct TV before their outing on NBC. (See my earlier article on how the numbers stack up for new media, on how that program is being funded and what a fair price would be for a viewer.)

People will pay for convenience and simplicity – both reasons why iTunes has been such a successful model, despite charging way too much for television and movie content.

There are dozens of ways that television, and new media production, could fund itself if there was the necessity and they couldn’t fall back on copyright. In fact in my “Making a living from new media” seminar, I outline 13 different ways that free media can lead to a decent middle class income.

If “Hollywood” wasn’t covered by copyright, how different would it be?

I’ve been thinking a lot over the last couple of months about news. In fact somewhere within me is brewing a book on the way that the Internet and technology has changed news so when the Digital Production BuZZ asked me to comment on the subject this week, it forced me to put some of the thoughts into a coherent form. Hopefully last night’s interview (my segment starts 20 minutes in) was, but I’d like to share those thoughts with you here.

I think most people are aware that the newspaper industry, in particular, is in trouble. The Internet and modern technology have changed the way we get and consume news. It’s also changed the way the way the news itself is gathered.

There are several ways that the Internet  and technology have changed news and I’m sure my thoughts here are going to only skim the surface. First, a little history. Back in the days PI (Pre-Internet) – really just on 15 years ago – news was hard to come by. We didn’t get information internationally, or even nationally, without the newspaper and to a lesser degree radio and Television but mostly the newspaper. The entire contents of an hour-long evening news bulletin would not take up the space of the front page of most newspapers of record, so it was to newspapers we looked for local, national and international news.

I used to be a 3-paper-a-day man back in Australia. The local newspaper for local news; the State-Capital based newspaper of record and the National financial news for, well national financial news. (I was a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors in those days, and had a keen interest in such things.)

I haven’t read a newspaper on a regular basis in 10 or more years! These days I get my news via RSS into an aggregator. My general (local, national, and international) news comes from eight major sources: AP, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NY Times, CNET, Sydney Morning Herald and Yahoo Technology News across two countries. But I’m only interested in a fraction of what they report.

But these are just eight of the nearly 300 RSS feeds that feed me the news I’m really interested in. No newspaper would ever be likely to give me that personalized look at the world as it evolves. Plus, I don’t have to wait 24 hours to get “aged news” (as Jason Jones put it on The Daily Show).

Now, back PI we needed the same AP article reproduced in the local paper in each market because that’s how we got the news. These days we only need the source – the original source which is rarely a newspaper or AP – and a link. It annoys me that the same story appears 20 times or more in one set of news feeds, duplicated from the same AP article and rarely with any editorial influence or rewriting.

In fact, I think you’ll find a good portion of most papers are simple rewrites of press releases or AP stories, with very little real reporting being done at all.

Blog aggregators like the Huffington Post and to an increasing degree, AOL who has more than doubled the number of reporters in the last year hiring those discarded by mainstream media, are creating their own reporting and commentary networks. News is coming directly from the source. We don’t need an AP or NYT outpost in Iran during an uprising. We get news from Iran, from The Tehran Bureau or Global Voices Online (a blog aggregator who knows which bloggers to trust).

As an indication of how much the news industry has changed, The Tehran Bureau, published by volunteers out a small suburban house in Massachusetts, has had very accurate and detailed information about what is going on in Iran while the mainstream media have been sidelined by the officials in the country and not able to report. Their information was being quoted and “reported” by mainstream media who can’t get coverage from their traditional channels.

None of this could happen without the Internet infrastructure and specific technologies that sit on top of it, and sometimes link into other technologies like the cellular phone network’s SMS system.

It was a blogger who bought down Dan Rather by revealing that the papers purporting to reveal irregularities with President George W. Bush’s service in the Air National Guard were fake. There are dozens of such incidents where bloggers,with time and the Internet at their disposal, have broken dozens of stories, with more accuracy and greater detail than the mainstream media. (Frankly the accuracy rate of mainstream media is pretty appalling.)

It was a cell phone recording that affected the balance of power in the Senate in the 2006 mid-term elections when a Democrat staffer recorded George Allen’s infamous “Maccaca” comment that, arguably, lost him his almost certain return to the Senate.

It was the cell phone video of “Neda” being shot in the civil disobendience after the Iranian election that helped inspire more people to come out in opposition to the Government of the country.

With millions and millions of cell phones in consumer’s hands it’s now more likely than not that a camera will be at the scene of a major incident. The first picture of Flight 1549 in the Hudson was from Janis Krums’ iPhone on the ferry that was first on the scene to pick up the passengers. Naturally he shared the photo via Twitter. (It was 34 minutes later that MSNBC interviewed him.)

Twitter was first to break the news, again. People have sent tweets from within the midst of the news, including instances where people have tweeted their involvement in a disaster like Mike Wilson, a passenger on board Continental’s Flight 1404, which skidded off the runway at Denver airport and burst into flames. Mike tweeted right after he escaped out of the plane’s emergency chutes and posted a picture of the foam-covered aircraft long before any traditional media was even aware of the accident.

When a Turkish Airlines Boeing landed short and broke apart at Amsterdam’s Schipol, the first word to the public was a Tweet, sent out by a fellow who lives near the airport. (FlightGlobal.com)

Twitter has become a major news source, such that there are now sites, like BreakingTweets.com, dedicated to breaking news on Twitter as a news site in addition to Twitter’s own Breaking News page. If you want the up-to-the minute news, you follow Twitter it seems.

Even if newspapers and the Associated Press ultimately fail, as they are most likely to, I still see a bright future for journalism, just not in the traditional places.

There is one more aspect to “news and the Internet” and that’s the social one. Many of the source I subscribe to in my RSS reader are bloggers who write in the space. I may miss an article or resource but Scott Simmons (on his own site or at ProVideoCoalition.com), Oliver Peters, Larry Jordan, Shane Ross, Lawrence (Larry) Jordan, John Chapell, or Norm Hollyn are there to find the things I miss and bring them to my attention. (Of course, usually with some insightful writing in between.)

I don’t have to read everything or be everywhere because the social networks I participate in create a new network far more valuable to me than the best efforts of the Associated Press!