Photography - World-of-Newave.info http://answers.world-of-newave.info/photography.htm Latest news and articles about Photography en-us Copyright (c)2004-2008.ยง/Newave SARL. All rights reserved. webmaster@world-of-newave.com (Webmaster) Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:54:51 GMT Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:54:51 GMT Newave Lisa XML Engine v1.0 - http://www.world-of-newave.info/about.htm 60 http://www.world-of-newave.info/images/wi8831.gif World-of-Newave.info - Knowledge and Informational Database http://www.world-of-newave.info/ 88 31 {NORTH AMERICA > REAL ESTATE} - Photo studio/Office for rent (SOMA / south beach) $125 800sqft http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/california/metro-areas/san-francisco-bay-area/business-and-economy/real-estate/photo-studio-office-for-rent-soma-south-beach-125-20080932910.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/california/metro-areas/san-francisco-bay-area/business-and-economy/real-estate/photo-studio-office-for-rent-soma-south-beach-125-20080932910.htm Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:10:01 GMT I'm a photographer based out of SOMA. I have photography studio that i'm renting daily for anyone needing office or studio space. The space has high ceilings, great natural light, sundeck, concrete floors and it's located in the design district section of SOMA. The space is about 800 sq. ft, that is counting all the common areas, kitchen and living room. The office/studio shooting space is only about 300 sq. ft. Parking is available for you or your clients. The space is perfect for portrait or product photography. Rates $125 half day(4hrs) or $200 full day(8hrs) If interested please reply with email and contact information. Have a nice day Sfbay.Craigslist.Org Photo studio/Office for rent (SOMA / south beach) $125 800sqft {new window}   Sfbay.Craigslist.Org - I'm a photographer based out of SOMA. I have photography studio that i'm renting daily for anyone needing office or studio space. The space has high ceilings, great natural light, sundeck, concrete floors and it's located in the design district section of SOMA. The space is about 800 sq. ft, that is counting all the common areas, kitchen and living room. The office/studio shooting space is only about 300 sq. ft. Parking is available for you or your clients. The space is perfect for portrait or product photography. Rates $125 half day(4hrs) or $200 full day(8hrs) If interested please reply with email and contact information. Have a nice day
Photo studio/Office for rent {...}
Published: September 8, 2008, 8:10 am - Indexed: September 8, 2008, 11:13 am - Page Size: 4KB
Category: Regional > North America > United States > California > Metro Areas > San Francisco Bay Area > Business and Economy > Real Estate

]]> Regional > North America > United States > California > Metro Areas > San Francisco Bay Area > Business and Economy > Real Estate {NEWS > BREAKING NEWS} - Crowdsourcing Book Excerpt: The Canary in the Coal Mine http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/crowdsourcing-book-excerpt-the-canary-in-the-coal-20080913513.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/crowdsourcing-book-excerpt-the-canary-in-the-coal-20080913513.htm Fri, 05 Sep 2008 22:00:00 GMT First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article, "crowdsourcing" describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few. Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise -- it's talented, creative and stunningly productive. Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today's technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. It's a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education and job history no longer matter, where the quality of work is all that counts and every field is open to people of every imaginable background. If you can perform the service, design the product or solve the problem, you've got the job. But crowdsourcing has also triggered a dramatic shift in the way work is organized, talent employed, research conducted and products made and marketed. As the crowd comes to supplant traditional forms of labor, pain and disruption are inevitable. When the original article was published, crowdsourcing still constituted a nascent business model. A few small companies had achieved limited successes with it, and large companies had only begun to test the waters. In this excerpt, Howe argues that in just two years crowdsourcing has revolutionized an entire industry -- stock photography -- and may well be poised to create disruption in other fields as well. - - - Adapted from Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, by Jeff Howe. More at Howe's Crowdsourcing Blog. Chapter 7: The Canary in the Coal Mine There's a story people like to tell about Bruce Livingstone. In late 2005, Getty Images, the world's largest photo agency, was looking to acquire Livingstone's company, iStockphoto, the world's most successful crowdsourcing company. Long before the contracts were drawn up, Livingstone, to show his commitment to the deal, tattooed the word "Getty" in cursive across the tender flesh on his inner wrist. Then he e-mailed Getty CEO Jonathan Klein photos of the tattoo under the message: "Don't make me write another word after this!" It's just the kind of tale -- emblematic of determination and just the right amount of quirky eccentricity -- that tends to burnish the reputation of its subject. In Livingstone's case, it has the added benefit of being demonstrably true. With his penchant for muscle cars, rockabilly haircuts and, yes, tattoos, it's tempting to call Livingstone an unlikely CEO. But I prefer to think of Livingstone as a perfectly reasonable chief for some corporation from, say, the year 2020. A company not unlike iStockphoto. Located in a single, cavernous room inside a former factory in downtown Calgary (Alberta, Canada), iStockphoto houses a tiny fraction of its actual workforce. And Livingstone, dressed in T-shirt and jeans, occupies a desk -- chosen, it would seem, at random -- in the middle of the floor. The corner office clearly loses significance in a company that thrives on decentralization. Jeff Howe explains crowdsourcing, which activates the transformative power of today's technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. Video: Courtesy of Jeff Howe Westeel Rosco built the factory in 1925 to manufacture nails, screws and other bits of hardware. Unlike Westeel Rosco, iStock's products -- stock photos, illustrations and videos -- aren't manufactured on-site. They're created by a global, fluid workforce of 60,000 part-time photographers and artists, only a fraction of whom make a living from the work they sell on iStock. Yet they have a devotion to the company matched by few traditional firms. The full-time staffers who spend their days in the old Westeel Rosco plant play a support role for the community -- and community is the only applicable word -- that is making the product iStock brings to market every day. And that community has been very, very good to Livingstone and his investors. In the course of several years iStock has grown from a hobby to the third-largest purveyor of stock images in the world. When Getty purchased iStock in early 2006, Livingstone took home more than half of the $50 million Getty paid for the company. The first stock photo agency was founded in 1920, and for most of the 20th century the industry was an afterthought, trafficking in the outtakes from commercial magazine assignments. Very few photographers tried to make a living off the market in preexisting images alone. This changed after the desktop publishing revolution of the mid-1980s led to a rapid growth in the publishing industry, and to a commensurate demand for images. Suddenly photographers were making six figures a year selling photos they'd already been paid to shoot. It was like minting money. Stock photography is, in relative terms, a tiny industry. The annual global gross for the entire business is estimated to be around $2 billion, which makes it a bit bigger than the market for gift baskets, but a little smaller than the annual sales of orchids. But this little industry has undergone big changes, and could well be a case study in how the crowd will impact much larger businesses. In just the last few years the influx of talented amateurs armed with inexpensive, high-resolution digital cameras has upended the economics of stock photography. Five years ago, a professional-quality image was still a scarce resource. No more. This isn't to say the market for high-end photographs has disappeared. A gifted photographer will always find work. But the professional no longer has a lock on the middle and lower ends of the stock photo business. With a modicum of training, just about anyone can take a decent shot. Sophisticated cameras and photo-editing software do the rest. iStock exploits this fact. Design firms and other small companies working on a budget quickly embraced what became known as the "microstock" model. One graphic designer told me he went from paying hundreds of dollars an image to less than $10. "I pass on some of the savings to my clients and keep the rest. We're both delighted." iStock might be great for buyers, but it's caused all sorts of headaches for professional stock photographers. In my original Wired article about crowdsourcing I quoted a Los Angeles-based photographer, Mark Harmel, saying that this influx of cheap images had caused a slight decline in his income from stock photo sales, which had dropped to $60,000. But in the two years since that decline has fallen off a cliff, to $35,000 in 2007. "If I look at the trend line, it just keeps going down. I'm really concentrating on getting assignments now," says Harmel. "I recently came back from London with 70 really wonderful shots. I'll probably use them on my website, but it's not worth my time to bother submitting them to a stock agency. They won't sell." Harmel's far from alone. In fact, Getty's other businesses have struggled in the crowdsourced era. In the year I spent writing this book the company's stock slid 60 percent, falling to just under $22 by February 2008. That month Getty was acquired by the private equity firm Hellman Friedman for $2.4 billion, a considerably lower figure than the company had originally sought. According to a report released at the time of the sale, Goldman Sachs estimates that Getty's core business -- the sale of rights-managed, professionally produced images -- will continue to suffer an irreversible decline, falling to just 29 percent of its revenues by 2012. In the same period the investment bank projects iStock to continue its rapid rate of growth. iStock sold $72 million worth of images in 2007, a figure expected to jump to $262 million by 2012. In this light, paying $50 million for a crowdsourced photo company looks like the smartest decision Getty ever made. The company is in the midst of transforming its business, from one reliant exclusively on professionals to one that is at least equally reliant on amateurs. As the Goliath of the industry, where Getty goes its competitors are sure to follow, which is to say, stock photography itself has been utterly transformed through crowdsourcing, in which a once-scarce commodity has become abundant. The question to ask is whether the upheaval roiling stock photography is only a leading indicator, like the minor volcanic eruptions that can precede a catastrophic earthquake. Already the trend is migrating to other fields. Most immediately, the same dynamics that made the stock photo ubiquitous -- affordable digital SLR cameras and burgeoning communities of enthusiastic amateurs -- are affecting other markets for visual images. So-called "citizen paparazzi" use cellphone cameras to snap impromptu shots of stars and then sell them to new photo agencies such as Scoopt, which specialize in buying up and marketing their work. Amateurs can beat professional paparazzi for the simple reason that they vastly outnumber them. It's a question of probability: The throng of pedestrians in Greenwich Village, for instance, have a much better chance of catching an unkempt Gwyneth Paltrow than a single paparazzo. And photography may well be just the beginning. iStock itself is doing a burgeoning business in the sale of stock video footage, and the crowd is also making commercials, collaborating on TV scripts, and recording and distributing their own music. They're writing political analysis, creating their own video games, and making feature-length movies. For the time being, all this activity has taken place in something of a parallel universe, without causing any of the economic upheaval visited on the stock photo or pornography industries. But those universes are beginning to collide as more companies attempt to package all this outpouring of creativity into a marketable product. While crowdsourcing has already emerged as a potent force in the media and entertainment industries, it's also profoundly influenced the way even Fortune 100 companies like Procter & Gamble do business. Once famous for its insular culture, Procter & Gamble now crowdsources much of its R&D process, using global networks of scientists such as InnoCentive and NineSigma, which boast a combined membership of 2 million professional and amateur researchers. Even companies operating in a conventional field such as mining have found crowdsourcing applications. The Canadian gold-mining group Goldcorp put geological survey data online and offered a $575,000 prize to anyone who could identify likely areas for exploration. Goldcorp says the contest produced 110 targets that yielded $3 billion in gold. Following its lead, the mining giant Barrick Gold Corporation recently offered $10 million to anyone who could improve its silver-extraction process. The open call of crowdsourcing is also being used by companies such as Google (to develop applications for its Android mobile platform) and Netflix (to improve its recommendation system). The question is whether the iStock secret sauce can be applied to industries like television and journalism and, possibly, even beyond to any business that traffics in bits and bytes. To answer that question, it helps to know what's in the secret sauce. The Community Is the Company iStock has been compared to a cult, and the analogy isn't entirely unfair. It's no accident that the most successful companies in the web's second coming -- most of whom traffic in the crowd's creative output -- are led by outsize personalities. "Bruce is to iStock what Tom is to MySpace," notes Garth Johnson, iStock's VP of Business Development. (Johnson resigned his position after this book went to press.) For those readers over the age of 30, Tom is Tom Anderson, the president of the social networking behemoth MySpace and the first "friend" to greet any new user. Under this new archetype of a company -- in which the community, as much as the customer, comes first -- the cult of personality plays a crucial role in community building, and Livingstone has been as essential to the growth of the iStock community as Anderson has been to MySpace's. "Bruce has a really strong, extremely charismatic personality online," says Johnson. "And that's really helped us build the community." It's safe to say that iStock has left the community-building phase behind: Sixty-thousand people have combined to create an enormous portfolio of over 3.5 million images and 100,000 videos. By contrast, Getty's other divisions combined only use 2,500 photographers. The iStockers offer the company their artwork, and in return iStock goes to extraordinary lengths to keep the iStockers happy. The site offers the budding photographer all manner of free tutorials, and the forums buzz -- at a rate of 38 posts per minute -- with questions about lens sizes, polarized filters and F-stop settings. iStock doesn't offer a chance to get rich. It offers the chance to make friends and become a better photographer. "We don't own anything, the community does" says Johnson. "Everything we do affects these people, whether they're just earning enough to pay for their equipment, or they're making mortgage payments from their photo sales. They all want a voice, and we have to give it to them, because really, the community is the company." The upside to this state of affairs should be obvious -- a dedicated, efficient workforce with no expectation of receiving a living wage -- but there are downsides as well: Even the smallest changes can roil the fickle, passionate community of iStockers. In March 2006, iStock launched a new feature on its web forums, a "forometer" which measured an iStocker's popularity through "bafflingly complex scientific methods" including the date and number of posts to the forum. The forometer displayed its results through a set of red, yellow or green bars. It did not go over well. The community questioned the principles behind the feature, as well as its functionality. Not long after its launch, the feature had been removed. Employees may be hell on overhead, but they're paid to accept all but the most draconian policies with a polite nod. Communities, on the other hand, aren't paid to stick around, and nothing stops them from selling their photos to one of iStock's many competitors. "They don't work for us," Livingstone laughs. "We work for them." If the iStocker feels a sense of ownership over the site, that's understandable: The iStock community predates iStock the company. Livingstone didn't set out to revolutionize an industry, he just wanted to fill a personal need and help a few friends at the same time. In 2000 Livingstone was running a small graphic design and web-hosting firm in Calgary. Bruce is an avid photographer himself, and over the years he had developed an extensive network of photographers and designers. Early in the year he took 2,000 of his images and put them online. Anyone could download his photos in exchange for giving him an e-mail address. Livingstone's friends decided they wanted to share their images with the public, too. That June the budding community instituted a credit system: A user could download one image for every image of theirs that had been downloaded by someone else. It was a classic example of the gift economy, the non-monetary exchange that grew up alongside the internet. During iStock's early years, everyone took something and gave something in turn. "The feeders and the eaters were the same people," as Livingstone puts it. Everyone profited by acquiring new images, though no one made (or spent) a dime. Soon friends of friends heard about Bruce's nifty idea and started uploading their images, too. Then around 2002 a wider public got wind of iStock, and the site began to hit critical mass. Soon Livingstone was paying $10,000 a month for the bandwidth to support it. He could have taken advertising to cover the cost of hosting, but he felt that would violate the spirit of the site. "The focus was on the community, and good design. Advertising would have cluttered the site," says Livingstone. Instead, he started charging a quarter for each image, and he opened the system up to the public. This proved to be a momentous decision. Word quickly spread among publishers that there was a site offering cheap, usable images, and photographers began flocking to iStock to upload their portfolios. Traffic to the site skyrocketed, and soon Livingstone raised the price to $1 per image. "I thought it might become a sideline business," he says. It quickly became much more than that. The quality of the images wasn't always as high (or as consistent) as a traditional stock agency's, but the differences were indiscernible to the general consumer, and after all, you couldn't beat the price. By 2004 a host of other so-called "micro-stocks" had sprung up with strategies similar to iStock's. The professionals panicked. Microstock photos, they charged, were flooding the market with subpar images. At first, the industry aligned itself against iStockphoto and other microstock agencies such as ShutterStock and Dreamstime. Then in early 2006, Getty announced it would buy iStockphoto for $50 million. "If someone's going to cannibalize your business, better it be one of your other businesses," Getty CEO Jonathan Klein told me shortly after the sale. Smaller magazines, nonprofit organizations, and all manner of websites have continued to flock to iStock's high-volume, low-cost model. As of February 2008, iStockphoto had 2 million regular customers purchasing photographs, video footage, illustrations and animations. "Bruce's brilliance," Jonathan Klein once told me, "is that he turned community into commerce." Livingstone uses a slightly different formulation: "I turned commerce into community," iStockphoto has perfected the Jedi Mind Trick that's at the heart of crowdsourcing. It's an incredibly cost-effective strategy -- iStock boasts a 55 percent profit margin. And yet, Livingstone stumbled into this business model by creating a context -- a community of like-minded enthusiasts -- in which financial measures take a backseat to considerably less tangible concerns. Ask someone in the office, and they'll tell you: It's not about the money. Ask an iStocker and they'll tell you the same thing. In fact -- would-be crowdsources take note: If it is about the money, it won't work. It will fizzle, not sizzle, as one of iStock's designers put it. "What's funny is, the money people, they pretty quickly get pulled aside in the forums by the core people. Or they just don't have a voice. People will ignore them, like 'Oh, that's just so and so, they're just here to make money.'" That doesn't mean the iStockers are unmotivated by self-interest. The more a photographer's images are downloaded, the more recognition they receive in the community, and the more credits they earn to download other people's photos to use in their own designs. And the additional income is also welcome, of course. Unlike other cases in which large corporations have attempted to monetize community, iStock does reward its contributors. It paid out $21 million in 2007. It's significant that people in online communities like iStock's react with great hostility to the idea that crowdsourcing is a form of cheap labor -- despite the fact it demonstrably is. After all, no one wants to feel exploited. In the end, what iStock provides is an invaluable if impossible-to-measure currency: meaning. The crowd will give away their time -- their excess capacity -- enthusiastically, but not for free. It has to be a meaningful exchange. Wired.Com Crowdsourcing Book Excerpt: The Canary in the Coal Mine {new window}   Www.Wired.Com - First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article, "crowdsourcing" describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few. Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise -- it's talented, creative and stunningly productive. Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today's technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. It's a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education and job history no longer matter, where the quality of work is all that counts and every field is open to people of every imaginable background. If you can perform the service, design the product or solve the problem, you've got the job. But crowdsourcing has also triggered a dramatic shift in the way work is organized, talent employed, research conducted and products made and marketed. As the crowd comes to supplant traditional forms of labor, pain and disruption are inevitable. When the original article was published, crowdsourcing still constituted a nascent business model. A few small companies had achieved limited successes with it, and large companies had only begun to test the waters. In this excerpt, Howe argues that in just two years crowdsourcing has revolutionized an entire industry -- stock photography -- and may well be poised to create disruption in other fields as well. - - - Adapted from Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, by Jeff Howe. More at Howe's Crowdsourcing Blog. Chapter 7: The Canary in the Coal Mine There's a story people like to tell about Bruce Livingstone. In late 2005, Getty Images, the world's largest photo agency, was looking to acquire Livingstone's company, iStockphoto, the world's most successful crowdsourcing company. Long before the contracts were drawn up, Livingstone, to show his commitment to the deal, tattooed the word "Getty" in cursive across the tender flesh on his inner wrist. Then he e-mailed Getty CEO Jonathan Klein photos of the tattoo under the message: "Don't make me write another word after this!" It's just the kind of tale -- emblematic of determination and just the right amount of quirky eccentricity -- that tends to burnish the reputation of its subject. In Livingstone's case, it has the added benefit of being demonstrably true. With his penchant for muscle cars, rockabilly haircuts and, yes, tattoos, it's tempting to call Livingstone an unlikely CEO. But I prefer to think of Livingstone as a perfectly reasonable chief for some corporation from, say, the year 2020. A company not unlike iStockphoto. Located in a single, cavernous room inside a former factory in downtown Calgary (Alberta, Canada), iStockphoto houses a tiny fraction of its actual workforce. And Livingstone, dressed in T-shirt and jeans, occupies a desk -- chosen, it would seem, at random -- in the middle of the floor. The corner office clearly loses significance in a company that thrives on decentralization. Jeff Howe explains crowdsourcing, which activates the transformative power of today's technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. Video: Courtesy of Jeff Howe Westeel Rosco built the factory in 1925 to manufacture nails, screws and other bits of hardware. Unlike Westeel Rosco, iStock's products -- stock photos, illustrations and videos -- aren't manufactured on-site. They're created by a global, fluid workforce of 60,000 part-time photographers and artists, only a fraction of whom make a living from the work they sell on iStock. Yet they have a devotion to the company matched by few traditional firms. The full-time staffers who spend their days in the old Westeel Rosco plant play a support role for the community -- and community is the only applicable word -- that is making the product iStock brings to market every day. And that community has been very, very good to Livingstone and his investors. In the course of several years iStock has grown from a hobby to the third-largest purveyor of stock images in the world. When Getty purchased iStock in early 2006, Livingstone took home more than half of the $50 million Getty paid for the company. The first stock photo agency was founded in 1920, and for most of the 20th century the industry was an afterthought, trafficking in the outtakes from commercial magazine assignments. Very few photographers tried to make a living off the market in preexisting images alone. This changed after the desktop publishing revolution of the mid-1980s led to a rapid growth in the publishing industry, and to a commensurate demand for images. Suddenly photographers were making six figures a year selling photos they'd already been paid to shoot. It was like minting money. Stock photography is, in relative terms, a tiny industry. The annual global gross for the entire business is estimated to be around $2 billion, which makes it a bit bigger than the market for gift baskets, but a little smaller than the annual sales of orchids. But this little industry has undergone big changes, and could well be a case study in how the crowd will impact much larger businesses. In just the last few years the influx of talented amateurs armed with inexpensive, high-resolution digital cameras has upended the economics of stock photography. Five years ago, a professional-quality image was still a scarce resource. No more. This isn't to say the market for high-end photographs has disappeared. A gifted photographer will always find work. But the professional no longer has a lock on the middle and lower ends of the stock photo business. With a modicum of training, just about anyone can take a decent shot. Sophisticated cameras and photo-editing software do the rest. iStock exploits this fact. Design firms and other small companies working on a budget quickly embraced what became known as the "microstock" model. One graphic designer told me he went from paying hundreds of dollars an image to less than $10. "I pass on some of the savings to my clients and keep the rest. We're both delighted." iStock might be great for buyers, but it's caused all sorts of headaches for professional stock photographers. In my original Wired article about crowdsourcing I quoted a Los Angeles-based photographer, Mark Harmel, saying that this influx of cheap images had caused a slight decline in his income from stock photo sales, which had dropped to $60,000. But in the two years since that decline has fallen off a cliff, to $35,000 in 2007. "If I look at the trend line, it just keeps going down. I'm really concentrating on getting assignments now," says Harmel. "I recently came back from London with 70 really wonderful shots. I'll probably use them on my website, but it's not worth my time to bother submitting them to a stock agency. They won't sell." Harmel's far from alone. In fact, Getty's other businesses have struggled in the crowdsourced era. In the year I spent writing this book the company's stock slid 60 percent, falling to just under $22 by February 2008. That month Getty was acquired by the private equity firm Hellman Friedman for $2.4 billion, a considerably lower figure than the company had originally sought. According to a report released at the time of the sale, Goldman Sachs estimates that Getty's core business -- the sale of rights-managed, professionally produced images -- will continue to suffer an irreversible decline, falling to just 29 percent of its revenues by 2012. In the same period the investment bank projects iStock to continue its rapid rate of growth. iStock sold $72 million worth of images in 2007, a figure expected to jump to $262 million by 2012. In this light, paying $50 million for a crowdsourced photo company looks like the smartest decision Getty ever made. The company is in the midst of transforming its business, from one reliant exclusively on professionals to one that is at least equally reliant on amateurs. As the Goliath of the industry, where Getty goes its competitors are sure to follow, which is to say, stock photography itself has been utterly transformed through crowdsourcing, in which a once-scarce commodity has become abundant. The question to ask is whether the upheaval roiling stock photography is only a leading indicator, like the minor volcanic eruptions that can precede a catastrophic earthquake. Already the trend is migrating to other fields. Most immediately, the same dynamics that made the stock photo ubiquitous -- affordable digital SLR cameras and burgeoning communities of enthusiastic amateurs -- are affecting other markets for visual images. So-called "citizen paparazzi" use cellphone cameras to snap impromptu shots of stars and then sell them to new photo agencies such as Scoopt, which specialize in buying up and marketing their work. Amateurs can beat professional paparazzi for the simple reason that they vastly outnumber them. It's a question of probability: The throng of pedestrians in Greenwich Village, for instance, have a much better chance of catching an unkempt Gwyneth Paltrow than a single paparazzo. And photography may well be just the beginning. iStock itself is doing a burgeoning business in the sale of stock video footage, and the crowd is also making commercials, collaborating on TV scripts, and recording and distributing their own music. They're writing political analysis, creating their own video games, and making feature-length movies. For the time being, all this activity has taken place in something of a parallel universe, without causing any of the economic upheaval visited on the stock photo or pornography industries. But those universes are beginning to collide as more companies attempt to package all this outpouring of creativity into a marketable product. While crowdsourcing has already emerged as a potent force in the media and entertainment industries, it's also profoundly influenced the way even Fortune 100 companies like Procter & Gamble do business. Once famous for its insular culture, Procter & Gamble now crowdsources much of its R&D process, using global networks of scientists such as InnoCentive and NineSigma, which boast a combined membership of 2 million professional and amateur researchers. Even companies operating in a conventional field such as mining have found crowdsourcing applications. The Canadian gold-mining group Goldcorp put geological survey data online and offered a $575,000 prize to anyone who could identify likely areas for exploration. Goldcorp says the contest produced 110 targets that yielded $3 billion in gold. Following its lead, the mining giant Barrick Gold Corporation recently offered $10 million to anyone who could improve its silver-extraction process. The open call of crowdsourcing is also being used by companies such as Google (to develop applications for its Android mobile platform) and Netflix (to improve its recommendation system). The question is whether the iStock secret sauce can be applied to industries like television and journalism and, possibly, even beyond to any business that traffics in bits and bytes. To answer that question, it helps to know what's in the secret sauce. The Community Is the Company iStock has been compared to a cult, and the analogy isn't entirely unfair. It's no accident that the most successful companies in the web's second coming -- most of whom traffic in the crowd's creative output -- are led by outsize personalities. "Bruce is to iStock what Tom is to MySpace," notes Garth Johnson, iStock's VP of Business Development. (Johnson resigned his position after this book went to press.) For those readers over the age of 30, Tom is Tom Anderson, the president of the social networking behemoth MySpace and the first "friend" to greet any new user. Under this new archetype of a company -- in which the community, as much as the customer, comes first -- the cult of personality plays a crucial role in community building, and Livingstone has been as essential to the growth of the iStock community as Anderson has been to MySpace's. "Bruce has a really strong, extremely charismatic personality online," says Johnson. "And that's really helped us build the community." It's safe to say that iStock has left the community-building phase behind: Sixty-thousand people have combined to create an enormous portfolio of over 3.5 million images and 100,000 videos. By contrast, Getty's other divisions combined only use 2,500 photographers. The iStockers offer the company their artwork, and in return iStock goes to extraordinary lengths to keep the iStockers happy. The site offers the budding photographer all manner of free tutorials, and the forums buzz -- at a rate of 38 posts per minute -- with questions about lens sizes, polarized filters and F-stop settings. iStock doesn't offer a chance to get rich. It offers the chance to make friends and become a better photographer. "We don't own anything, the community does" says Johnson. "Everything we do affects these people, whether they're just earning enough to pay for their equipment, or they're making mortgage payments from their photo sales. They all want a voice, and we have to give it to them, because really, the community is the company." The upside to this state of affairs should be obvious -- a dedicated, efficient workforce with no expectation of receiving a living wage -- but there are downsides as well: Even the smallest changes can roil the fickle, passionate community of iStockers. In March 2006, iStock launched a new feature on its web forums, a "forometer" which measured an iStocker's popularity through "bafflingly complex scientific methods" including the date and number of posts to the forum. The forometer displayed its results through a set of red, yellow or green bars. It did not go over well. The community questioned the principles behind the feature, as well as its functionality. Not long after its launch, the feature had been removed. Employees may be hell on overhead, but they're paid to accept all but the most draconian policies with a polite nod. Communities, on the other hand, aren't paid to stick around, and nothing stops them from selling their photos to one of iStock's many competitors. "They don't work for us," Livingstone laughs. "We work for them." If the iStocker feels a sense of ownership over the site, that's understandable: The iStock community predates iStock the company. Livingstone didn't set out to revolutionize an industry, he just wanted to fill a personal need and help a few friends at the same time. In 2000 Livingstone was running a small graphic design and web-hosting firm in Calgary. Bruce is an avid photographer himself, and over the years he had developed an extensive network of photographers and designers. Early in the year he took 2,000 of his images and put them online. Anyone could download his photos in exchange for giving him an e-mail address. Livingstone's friends decided they wanted to share their images with the public, too. That June the budding community instituted a credit system: A user could download one image for every image of theirs that had been downloaded by someone else. It was a classic example of the gift economy, the non-monetary exchange that grew up alongside the internet. During iStock's early years, everyone took something and gave something in turn. "The feeders and the eaters were the same people," as Livingstone puts it. Everyone profited by acquiring new images, though no one made (or spent) a dime. Soon friends of friends heard about Bruce's nifty idea and started uploading their images, too. Then around 2002 a wider public got wind of iStock, and the site began to hit critical mass. Soon Livingstone was paying $10,000 a month for the bandwidth to support it. He could have taken advertising to cover the cost of hosting, but he felt that would violate the spirit of the site. "The focus was on the community, and good design. Advertising would have cluttered the site," says Livingstone. Instead, he started charging a quarter for each image, and he opened the system up to the public. This proved to be a momentous decision. Word quickly spread among publishers that there was a site offering cheap, usable images, and photographers began flocking to iStock to upload their portfolios. Traffic to the site skyrocketed, and soon Livingstone raised the price to $1 per image. "I thought it might become a sideline business," he says. It quickly became much more than that. The quality of the images wasn't always as high (or as consistent) as a traditional stock agency's, but the differences were indiscernible to the general consumer, and after all, you couldn't beat the price. By 2004 a host of other so-called "micro-stocks" had sprung up with strategies similar to iStock's. The professionals panicked. Microstock photos, they charged, were flooding the market with subpar images. At first, the industry aligned itself against iStockphoto and other microstock agencies such as ShutterStock and Dreamstime. Then in early 2006, Getty announced it would buy iStockphoto for $50 million. "If someone's going to cannibalize your business, better it be one of your other businesses," Getty CEO Jonathan Klein told me shortly after the sale. Smaller magazines, nonprofit organizations, and all manner of websites have continued to flock to iStock's high-volume, low-cost model. As of February 2008, iStockphoto had 2 million regular customers purchasing photographs, video footage, illustrations and animations. "Bruce's brilliance," Jonathan Klein once told me, "is that he turned community into commerce." Livingstone uses a slightly different formulation: "I turned commerce into community," iStockphoto has perfected the Jedi Mind Trick that's at the heart of crowdsourcing. It's an incredibly cost-effective strategy -- iStock boasts a 55 percent profit margin. And yet, Livingstone stumbled into this business model by creating a context -- a community of like-minded enthusiasts -- in which financial measures take a backseat to considerably less tangible concerns. Ask someone in the office, and they'll tell you: It's not about the money. Ask an iStocker and they'll tell you the same thing. In fact -- would-be crowdsources take note: If it is about the money, it won't work. It will fizzle, not sizzle, as one of iStock's designers put it. "What's funny is, the money people, they pretty quickly get pulled aside in the forums by the core people. Or they just don't have a voice. People will ignore them, like 'Oh, that's just so and so, they're just here to make money.'" That doesn't mean the iStockers are unmotivated by self-interest. The more a photographer's images are downloaded, the more recognition they receive in the community, and the more credits they earn to download other people's photos to use in their own designs. And the additional income is also welcome, of course. Unlike other cases in which large corporations have attempted to monetize community, iStock does reward its contributors. It paid out $21 million in 2007. It's significant that people in online communities like iStock's react with great hostility to the idea that crowdsourcing is a form of cheap labor -- despite the fact it demonstrably is. After all, no one wants to feel exploited. In the end, what iStock provides is an invaluable if impossible-to-measure currency: meaning. The crowd will give away their time -- their excess capacity -- enthusiastically, but not for free. It has to be a meaningful exchange.
In this excerpt from the new book {...}
Published: September 5, 2008, 10:00 pm - Indexed: September 8, 2008, 11:26 am - Page Size: 49KB
Category: News > Breaking News

]]> News > Breaking News {LITERATURE > CYBERPUNK} - Bruce Mozert's amazing 1930s underwater photography http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/cyberpunk/bruce-mozert-s-amazing-1930s-underwater-photography-2008098438.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/cyberpunk/bruce-mozert-s-amazing-1930s-underwater-photography-2008098438.htm Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:15:57 GMT Waterproof cameras are no big deal these days, but in the 1930s, Bruce Mozert was the only person in the world who had one. Mozert pioneered underwater photography in Silver Springs, Florida. He had stopped there en route to a shoot in Miami in 1938 when he'd heard that his favorite actor, Johnny Weissmuller, was filming Tarzan there; he ended up staying for the rest of his life (he still lives nearby). Mozert wanted the world to know how amazingly clear the water in Silver Springs was. So he built a giant waterproof housing for his camera, put on some scuba gear, and?for the next 45 years?created memorable underwater scenes of everyday American life. He did fun things like use dry ice to make bubbles and cans of condensed milk to create smoke. Silver Springs: The Underwater Photography of Bruce Mozert (Amazon) The Life Aquatic with Bruce Mozert (The Smithsonian)( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)... Boingboing.Net Bruce Mozert's amazing 1930s underwater photography {new window}   Www.Boingboing.Net - Waterproof cameras are no big deal these days, but in the 1930s, Bruce Mozert was the only person in the world who had one. Mozert pioneered underwater photography in Silver Springs, Florida. He had stopped there en route to a shoot in Miami in 1938 when he'd heard that his favorite actor, Johnny Weissmuller, was filming Tarzan there; he ended up staying for the rest of his life (he still lives nearby). Mozert wanted the world to know how amazingly clear the water in Silver Springs was. So he built a giant waterproof housing for his camera, put on some scuba gear, and?for the next 45 years?created memorable underwater scenes of everyday American life. He did fun things like use dry ice to make bubbles and cans of condensed milk to create smoke. Silver Springs: The Underwater Photography of Bruce Mozert (Amazon) The Life Aquatic with Bruce Mozert (The Smithsonian)( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)...
Bruce Mozert's amazing 1930s underwater photography - Boing Boing {...}
Published: September 4, 2008, 7:15 pm - Indexed: September 4, 2008, 7:36 pm - Page Size: 30KB
Category: Arts > Literature > Genres > Cyberpunk

]]> Arts > Literature > Genres > Cyberpunk {NORTH AMERICA > REAL ESTATE} - Photography studio/office share available now (san rafael) $475 1300sqft http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/california/metro-areas/san-francisco-bay-area/business-and-economy/real-estate/photography-studio-office-share-available-now-20080972511.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/california/metro-areas/san-francisco-bay-area/business-and-economy/real-estate/photography-studio-office-share-available-now-20080972511.htm Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:44:26 GMT Photography studio and office space available for share in downtown San Rafael on 4th St. Light, bright, modern space perfect for photographers and creative types. We have rented one spot already and are looking for one more person to fill the other spot. Please read attached jpeg (It previews small on CL, so I can email you a full size version). Call or email us to come and see the space. Serious inquiries only please. 6 mo commitment/agreement required. Contact Lisa @ 415-272-5511 for more information Sfbay.Craigslist.Org Photography studio/office share available now (san rafael) $475 1300sqft {new window}   Sfbay.Craigslist.Org - Photography studio and office space available for share in downtown San Rafael on 4th St. Light, bright, modern space perfect for photographers and creative types. We have rented one spot already and are looking for one more person to fill the other spot. Please read attached jpeg (It previews small on CL, so I can email you a full size version). Call or email us to come and see the space. Serious inquiries only please. 6 mo commitment/agreement required. Contact Lisa @ 415-272-5511 for more information
Photography studio/office share available now {...}
Published: September 4, 2008, 6:44 pm - Indexed: September 4, 2008, 8:57 pm - Page Size: 4KB
Category: Regional > North America > United States > California > Metro Areas > San Francisco Bay Area > Business and Economy > Real Estate

]]> Regional > North America > United States > California > Metro Areas > San Francisco Bay Area > Business and Economy > Real Estate {LITERATURE > CYBERPUNK} - Chenman's Great Wall fashion photography http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/cyberpunk/chenman-s-great-wall-fashion-photography-2008095677.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/cyberpunk/chenman-s-great-wall-fashion-photography-2008095677.htm Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:57:44 GMT Chenman is not a man. She's a Beijing-born twenty-something woman who has become one of the most well-known fashion photographers in China. She does a lot of high profile work, like covers for Chinese Vogue and ads for Adidas and Sony Ericsson, but I love her personal stuff the best. Here's a shot of unlikely supermodel Lv Yan rocking out on the Great Wall. (The last fashion photography I saw at this location was by Tyra Banks for ANTM. Not quite as stunning.) Chenman's web site via NotCot( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)... Boingboing.Net Chenman's Great Wall fashion photography {new window}   Www.Boingboing.Net - Chenman is not a man. She's a Beijing-born twenty-something woman who has become one of the most well-known fashion photographers in China. She does a lot of high profile work, like covers for Chinese Vogue and ads for Adidas and Sony Ericsson, but I love her personal stuff the best. Here's a shot of unlikely supermodel Lv Yan rocking out on the Great Wall. (The last fashion photography I saw at this location was by Tyra Banks for ANTM. Not quite as stunning.) Chenman's web site via NotCot( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)...
Chenman's Great Wall fashion photography - Boing Boing {...}
Published: September 3, 2008, 7:57 pm - Indexed: September 4, 2008, 7:36 pm - Page Size: 41KB
Category: Arts > Literature > Genres > Cyberpunk

]]> Arts > Literature > Genres > Cyberpunk {LITERATURE > CYBERPUNK} - Book about photobooths http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/cyberpunk/book-about-photobooths-20080960111.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/cyberpunk/book-about-photobooths-20080960111.htm Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:53:20 GMT American Photobooth is a new illustrated history of photobooths, which first made their splash in the 1920s. Photographer Nakki Goranin became obsessed with the technology after creating a series of her own photobooth self-portraits now in the collection of the International Center for Photography in New York. She then spent nearly a decade tracing the history and culture of photobooths and collected thousands of vintage photobooth prints, like those above. The new issue of Smithsonian profiles Goranin and includes an online slideshow of images from the book. From Smithsonian: Goranin doesn't much care for the mall's machine, which is digital?the print quality is not what it used to be. But, she says, there are only about 250 authentic chemical booths left in the United States... Before the photobooth first appeared, in the 1920s, most portraits were made in studios. The new, inexpensive process made photography accessible to everyone. "For 25 cents people could go and get some memory of who they were, of a special occasion, of a first date, an anniversary, a graduation," Goranin says. "For many people, those were the only photos of themselves that they had." Because there is no photographer to intimidate, photobooth subjects tend to be much less self-conscious. The result?a young boy embracing his mother or teenagers sneaking a first kiss?is often exceptionally intimate. "It's like a theater that's just you and the lens," Goranin says. "And you can be anyone you want to be." Photobooth article (Smithsonian), Buy American Photobooths (Amazon)... Boingboing.Net Book about photobooths {new window}   Www.Boingboing.Net - American Photobooth is a new illustrated history of photobooths, which first made their splash in the 1920s. Photographer Nakki Goranin became obsessed with the technology after creating a series of her own photobooth self-portraits now in the collection of the International Center for Photography in New York. She then spent nearly a decade tracing the history and culture of photobooths and collected thousands of vintage photobooth prints, like those above. The new issue of Smithsonian profiles Goranin and includes an online slideshow of images from the book. From Smithsonian: Goranin doesn't much care for the mall's machine, which is digital?the print quality is not what it used to be. But, she says, there are only about 250 authentic chemical booths left in the United States... Before the photobooth first appeared, in the 1920s, most portraits were made in studios. The new, inexpensive process made photography accessible to everyone. "For 25 cents people could go and get some memory of who they were, of a special occasion, of a first date, an anniversary, a graduation," Goranin says. "For many people, those were the only photos of themselves that they had." Because there is no photographer to intimidate, photobooth subjects tend to be much less self-conscious. The result?a young boy embracing his mother or teenagers sneaking a first kiss?is often exceptionally intimate. "It's like a theater that's just you and the lens," Goranin says. "And you can be anyone you want to be." Photobooth article (Smithsonian), Buy American Photobooths (Amazon)...
Book about photobooths - Boing Boing {...}
Published: September 3, 2008, 7:53 pm - Indexed: September 4, 2008, 7:36 pm - Page Size: 47KB
Category: Arts > Literature > Genres > Cyberpunk

]]> Arts > Literature > Genres > Cyberpunk {ISSUES > BIAS AND BALANCE} - Boehlert: The Denver media migraine http://articles.world-of-newave.info/society/issues/business/media/bias-and-balance/boehlert-the-denver-media-migraine-2008093435.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/society/issues/business/media/bias-and-balance/boehlert-the-denver-media-migraine-2008093435.htm Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:52:03 GMT I had to chuckle when I read about the newsroom-wide email New York Times executive editor Bill Keller sent out to his staff last week on the eve of his political team deploying to Denver, and then St. Paul, to cover the political conventions. In his electronic memo, Keller praised the newspaper's coverage of the just-completed Beijing Olympics ("dazzling"), and, like any good newsroom manager, challenged the rest of the newspaper to match that excellence. Specifically, he called on his political team to reach the same journalistic heights at the conventions that the Times' sports department had achieved in Beijing. I laughed not because I thought the Times' coverage of the Olympics didn't deserve a pat on the back. Indeed, the Times crew seemed to cover the Olympics with uniform skill and grace. Its pages were filled with often brilliant deadline writing, insightful analysis, gripping human interest stories, and eye-popping photography. (And the Times' Internet-based coverage was just as impressive.) My caustic chuckle sprang from the fact that Keller actually thought the Times' upcoming convention coverage was going to achieve some kind of greatness. That the Times team was going to gumshoe Denver like no other news team, drill down to the issues that were driving the campaign, break away from the news pack to uncover fresh angles, and set some kind of news standard for political reporting. The sad truth was that the coverage, not just from the Times but from virtually every traditional outlet I sampled, was a fiasco. And it made my head hurt. How 15,000 credentialed journalists could descend on Denver and produce such unvaryingly weak and shoddy coverage of a staged news event -- and do it with coverage that celebrated sameness and shallowness -- was a sad spectacle that newsrooms nationwide ought to ponder. What we saw beamed out of Beijing, both in print and video form, was often memorable journalism. What we saw seep out of Denver was a farce. Not content to simply cover what was, by every standard, an historic and fascinating political gathering, the press felt the need to embellish the storylines (when not completely inventing them), tell news consumers what to think and how to feel, and to hog the spotlight by turning themselves into the topic of news reports. The media hordes "got in the way of the story, because they made themselves the story," noted Brooke Gladstone at NPR. (Exhibit A.) Note that approximately 20,000 journalists covered the sprawling Beijing Olympics, and think about the wonderful journalism they produced for news consumers all around the world relaying headlines and capturing the emotions of that two-week epic event. By contrast, in Denver, 15,000 pros camped out and pretty much embarrassed their profession for nearly four days straight. First of all, why on earth would 15,000 journalists cover any convention? And why do major American outlets, as confirmed by Keller's email, view the staged political events to be as newsworthy as a global phenomenon such as the Olympics? Note that for this year's conventions, USA Today sent 34 journalists, compared to the 41 staffers the paper assigned to cover the Olympics. (The Washington Post sent 38 journalists to the convention, plus an undisclosed number from its website, for a total of more than 50.) I'm guessing the Times sent roughly the same number as USA Today to both the convention and to Beijing. Yet look how badly the Denver team underperformed as compared to the Times' Olympics reporting and commentary. Or did Times execs consider Maureen Dowd's Denver column to be an example of journalistic insight? That was the one where the first person she quoted to capture the "vibe" of the Democratic convention was a Republican consultant. (Naturally, the partisan pro claimed "submerged hate" permeated the event.) And what about Patrick Healy's August 28, page one article about Hillary's address to the convention where Healy reported, in the second paragraph, that she "took steps on Tuesday -- deliberate steps, aides said -- to keep the door open to a future bid for the presidency." As the Daily Howler noted, there wasn't a single fact or quote in the entire article to back up Healy's fictitious claim that bolstered the "ill will" theme of the article's opening. Was that the kind of Denver gold Keller was hoping for? Imagine if a Times reporter filed a front-page story from Beijing about Michael Phelps and inserted a completely unsupported claim up high in the article that made Phelps look petty and selfish. Think Times editors would have printed it? And what about Times heavy hitter Jill Abramson, who wrote matter-of-factly on Friday that the Monday-through-Wednesday portion of the convention had a theme, and "its narrative was [the Clinton] soap opera." And specifically, the "narrative" was whether Bill and Hillary would "behave themselves" and "embrace Barack Obama." She wrote that after the convention had concluded, after Bill and Hillary Clinton had enthusiastically endorsed Barack Obama and after Democrats ended the convention on an historic and united front. Even then, the Times was still pushing the media's beloved narrative of a Clinton "soap opera" and how the two nearly ripped the party in two inside the Pepsi Center. Question for Abramson: Who pre-selected that "soap opera" narrative? Answer: The press. What actual proof did the press have to support it? Almost none. (Hillary Clinton had already publicly, and formally, endorsed Obama months prior to the convention.) I suspect if a truth serum poll could have been conducted in Denver to find out how many professional pol watchers within the press corps actually thought that Bill or Hillary Clinton would refuse to "embrace" Obama at the convention, the answer would have been zero. But how many within the press pretended for days that that was a possibility? Almost all of them. Indeed, there was lots of pretending going on in Denver, like when Politico suggested Hillary Clinton might be booed by Obama delegates during her address. And when, prior to Bill Clinton's taking the Denver stage, MSNBC's Chris Matthews raised the possibility that he might get a Bronx cheer. (Apparently because they're such divisive figures within the Democratic Party.) Viewers who saw the rapturous welcome both Clinton's received will recall that those predictions were inaccurate. The Newark Star-Ledger was just one of many news outlets that pretended about Hillary Clinton's speech, claiming it "was the most anxiously awaited moment of the convention." Really? Twelve million more viewers tuned in to Obama's speech than watched Clinton's address. Yet the press, confusing themselves for actual voters, told us all week that Americans were fixated on the runner-up. And all week long, that passed as insight. What was behind that type of half-baked Times/Politico/Matthews convention analysis? The answer is that it was based on nothing. The concocted Clinton storylines simply reflected what some journalists wanted to see happen, which then made it slightly plausible, and therefore news. (Speculating now trumps reporting.) To suggest that approach demolishes decades' worth of American journalism standards would be an understatement. It's impossible to escape the conclusion that journalists for much of the week in Denver weren't informing news consumers about the unfolding event, they were purposefully misinforming people. (Bill and Hill might snub Obama!) Think about where journalism is heading when an entire industry knowingly adopts a false narrative and pushes it for days simply because it likes it; because it gives journalists a good storyline. Fifteen thousand journalists in Denver and they couldn't even report what actually happened there. Instead, they invented a storyline of their liking. And (surprise!) it was one that demeaned Democrats. And that's where the real harm came, because Denver wasn't simply a case of too many journalists chasing too few stories and having to fill up too much air time (i.e., being boring). It was a case of too many journalists embracing manufactured stories in order to fill up airtime. Like the insipid, day-long media boomlet, propagated by the GOP, about whether or not the columns constructed for the stage Obama appeared on Thursday night at Invesco Field would somehow take away from his speech or distract viewers. Or the incessant media mentions about the long-debunked myth that Pennsylvania Gov. Bob Casey Sr. was denied a speaking role at the 1992 Democratic convention because he opposed abortion rights. And guess what? All the bogus convention storylines poked Democrats. Do you think the same press trend will continue in St. Paul this week? Will journalists attach themselves to flimsy narratives that make Republicans look weak and divided? I have my doubts. What's so curious about the effusive, often breathless, convention coverage we see today is that not that long ago there was growing media momentum to shun the events. Remember back in 1996 when ABC's Ted Koppel famously packed up his Nightline crew after two days at the GOP convention in San Diego and went home, complaining there was no news to report at the tightly scripted pageants? (Koppel still feels that way, making the inarguable point on NBC last week that the conventions could easily be covered by 1,000 journalists instead of 15,000.) There was a growing feeling that took root in the late 1990s that the overscripted conventions were a joke in terms of news, that they insulted the intelligence of serious journalists, and that something needed to be done to change them (i.e., shorten them) because it was becoming increasingly difficult to justify lavishing so much time and attention on the quadrennial confabs. Fast forward to 2008 and ask yourselves: Have the national conventions become any less scripted? No. If anything, the conventions have become more controlled. But boy, the media's attitude towards them has completely reversed. Rather than pulling the cameras back as Koppel suggested, the amount of TV time devoted to conventions (well, the amount of TV time devoted to talking about the conventions on-site) has absolutely exploded. Thanks to cable television's nearly around-the-clock coverage, there were easily 150 hours set aside last week for the Democratic convention. Television's eruption of convention interest mirrors the widespread enthusiasm throughout the press corps for the political events. No longer seen as insulting, artificial events that had to be covered for tradition's sake, the press now revels in the conventions -- celebrates them! -- and treats them as wildly important, entertaining, and newsworthy. To me, that 180-degree shift from "Conventions are fake!" to "Conventions are awesome!" captures the disappearing standards within political journalism and how a new breed of shallowness has been embraced and become a hallmark trait. Prior to Denver's opening gavel, Slate's Jack Shafer, bemoaning the obvious press excesses surrounding the non-news conventions, wrote, "If the political press corps were honest, they'd start every convention story with the finding that nothing important happened that day and that your attention is not needed." His take was dead-on. And that was before we knew what kind of leaky journalism was going to ooze out of Denver. Mediamatters.Org Boehlert: The Denver media migraine {new window}   Mediamatters.Org - I had to chuckle when I read about the newsroom-wide email New York Times executive editor Bill Keller sent out to his staff last week on the eve of his political team deploying to Denver, and then St. Paul, to cover the political conventions. In his electronic memo, Keller praised the newspaper's coverage of the just-completed Beijing Olympics ("dazzling"), and, like any good newsroom manager, challenged the rest of the newspaper to match that excellence. Specifically, he called on his political team to reach the same journalistic heights at the conventions that the Times' sports department had achieved in Beijing. I laughed not because I thought the Times' coverage of the Olympics didn't deserve a pat on the back. Indeed, the Times crew seemed to cover the Olympics with uniform skill and grace. Its pages were filled with often brilliant deadline writing, insightful analysis, gripping human interest stories, and eye-popping photography. (And the Times' Internet-based coverage was just as impressive.) My caustic chuckle sprang from the fact that Keller actually thought the Times' upcoming convention coverage was going to achieve some kind of greatness. That the Times team was going to gumshoe Denver like no other news team, drill down to the issues that were driving the campaign, break away from the news pack to uncover fresh angles, and set some kind of news standard for political reporting. The sad truth was that the coverage, not just from the Times but from virtually every traditional outlet I sampled, was a fiasco. And it made my head hurt. How 15,000 credentialed journalists could descend on Denver and produce such unvaryingly weak and shoddy coverage of a staged news event -- and do it with coverage that celebrated sameness and shallowness -- was a sad spectacle that newsrooms nationwide ought to ponder. What we saw beamed out of Beijing, both in print and video form, was often memorable journalism. What we saw seep out of Denver was a farce. Not content to simply cover what was, by every standard, an historic and fascinating political gathering, the press felt the need to embellish the storylines (when not completely inventing them), tell news consumers what to think and how to feel, and to hog the spotlight by turning themselves into the topic of news reports. The media hordes "got in the way of the story, because they made themselves the story," noted Brooke Gladstone at NPR. (Exhibit A.) Note that approximately 20,000 journalists covered the sprawling Beijing Olympics, and think about the wonderful journalism they produced for news consumers all around the world relaying headlines and capturing the emotions of that two-week epic event. By contrast, in Denver, 15,000 pros camped out and pretty much embarrassed their profession for nearly four days straight. First of all, why on earth would 15,000 journalists cover any convention? And why do major American outlets, as confirmed by Keller's email, view the staged political events to be as newsworthy as a global phenomenon such as the Olympics? Note that for this year's conventions, USA Today sent 34 journalists, compared to the 41 staffers the paper assigned to cover the Olympics. (The Washington Post sent 38 journalists to the convention, plus an undisclosed number from its website, for a total of more than 50.) I'm guessing the Times sent roughly the same number as USA Today to both the convention and to Beijing. Yet look how badly the Denver team underperformed as compared to the Times' Olympics reporting and commentary. Or did Times execs consider Maureen Dowd's Denver column to be an example of journalistic insight? That was the one where the first person she quoted to capture the "vibe" of the Democratic convention was a Republican consultant. (Naturally, the partisan pro claimed "submerged hate" permeated the event.) And what about Patrick Healy's August 28, page one article about Hillary's address to the convention where Healy reported, in the second paragraph, that she "took steps on Tuesday -- deliberate steps, aides said -- to keep the door open to a future bid for the presidency." As the Daily Howler noted, there wasn't a single fact or quote in the entire article to back up Healy's fictitious claim that bolstered the "ill will" theme of the article's opening. Was that the kind of Denver gold Keller was hoping for? Imagine if a Times reporter filed a front-page story from Beijing about Michael Phelps and inserted a completely unsupported claim up high in the article that made Phelps look petty and selfish. Think Times editors would have printed it? And what about Times heavy hitter Jill Abramson, who wrote matter-of-factly on Friday that the Monday-through-Wednesday portion of the convention had a theme, and "its narrative was [the Clinton] soap opera." And specifically, the "narrative" was whether Bill and Hillary would "behave themselves" and "embrace Barack Obama." She wrote that after the convention had concluded, after Bill and Hillary Clinton had enthusiastically endorsed Barack Obama and after Democrats ended the convention on an historic and united front. Even then, the Times was still pushing the media's beloved narrative of a Clinton "soap opera" and how the two nearly ripped the party in two inside the Pepsi Center. Question for Abramson: Who pre-selected that "soap opera" narrative? Answer: The press. What actual proof did the press have to support it? Almost none. (Hillary Clinton had already publicly, and formally, endorsed Obama months prior to the convention.) I suspect if a truth serum poll could have been conducted in Denver to find out how many professional pol watchers within the press corps actually thought that Bill or Hillary Clinton would refuse to "embrace" Obama at the convention, the answer would have been zero. But how many within the press pretended for days that that was a possibility? Almost all of them. Indeed, there was lots of pretending going on in Denver, like when Politico suggested Hillary Clinton might be booed by Obama delegates during her address. And when, prior to Bill Clinton's taking the Denver stage, MSNBC's Chris Matthews raised the possibility that he might get a Bronx cheer. (Apparently because they're such divisive figures within the Democratic Party.) Viewers who saw the rapturous welcome both Clinton's received will recall that those predictions were inaccurate. The Newark Star-Ledger was just one of many news outlets that pretended about Hillary Clinton's speech, claiming it "was the most anxiously awaited moment of the convention." Really? Twelve million more viewers tuned in to Obama's speech than watched Clinton's address. Yet the press, confusing themselves for actual voters, told us all week that Americans were fixated on the runner-up. And all week long, that passed as insight. What was behind that type of half-baked Times/Politico/Matthews convention analysis? The answer is that it was based on nothing. The concocted Clinton storylines simply reflected what some journalists wanted to see happen, which then made it slightly plausible, and therefore news. (Speculating now trumps reporting.) To suggest that approach demolishes decades' worth of American journalism standards would be an understatement. It's impossible to escape the conclusion that journalists for much of the week in Denver weren't informing news consumers about the unfolding event, they were purposefully misinforming people. (Bill and Hill might snub Obama!) Think about where journalism is heading when an entire industry knowingly adopts a false narrative and pushes it for days simply because it likes it; because it gives journalists a good storyline. Fifteen thousand journalists in Denver and they couldn't even report what actually happened there. Instead, they invented a storyline of their liking. And (surprise!) it was one that demeaned Democrats. And that's where the real harm came, because Denver wasn't simply a case of too many journalists chasing too few stories and having to fill up too much air time (i.e., being boring). It was a case of too many journalists embracing manufactured stories in order to fill up airtime. Like the insipid, day-long media boomlet, propagated by the GOP, about whether or not the columns constructed for the stage Obama appeared on Thursday night at Invesco Field would somehow take away from his speech or distract viewers. Or the incessant media mentions about the long-debunked myth that Pennsylvania Gov. Bob Casey Sr. was denied a speaking role at the 1992 Democratic convention because he opposed abortion rights. And guess what? All the bogus convention storylines poked Democrats. Do you think the same press trend will continue in St. Paul this week? Will journalists attach themselves to flimsy narratives that make Republicans look weak and divided? I have my doubts. What's so curious about the effusive, often breathless, convention coverage we see today is that not that long ago there was growing media momentum to shun the events. Remember back in 1996 when ABC's Ted Koppel famously packed up his Nightline crew after two days at the GOP convention in San Diego and went home, complaining there was no news to report at the tightly scripted pageants? (Koppel still feels that way, making the inarguable point on NBC last week that the conventions could easily be covered by 1,000 journalists instead of 15,000.) There was a growing feeling that took root in the late 1990s that the overscripted conventions were a joke in terms of news, that they insulted the intelligence of serious journalists, and that something needed to be done to change them (i.e., shorten them) because it was becoming increasingly difficult to justify lavishing so much time and attention on the quadrennial confabs. Fast forward to 2008 and ask yourselves: Have the national conventions become any less scripted? No. If anything, the conventions have become more controlled. But boy, the media's attitude towards them has completely reversed. Rather than pulling the cameras back as Koppel suggested, the amount of TV time devoted to conventions (well, the amount of TV time devoted to talking about the conventions on-site) has absolutely exploded. Thanks to cable television's nearly around-the-clock coverage, there were easily 150 hours set aside last week for the Democratic convention. Television's eruption of convention interest mirrors the widespread enthusiasm throughout the press corps for the political events. No longer seen as insulting, artificial events that had to be covered for tradition's sake, the press now revels in the conventions -- celebrates them! -- and treats them as wildly important, entertaining, and newsworthy. To me, that 180-degree shift from "Conventions are fake!" to "Conventions are awesome!" captures the disappearing standards within political journalism and how a new breed of shallowness has been embraced and become a hallmark trait. Prior to Denver's opening gavel, Slate's Jack Shafer, bemoaning the obvious press excesses surrounding the non-news conventions, wrote, "If the political press corps were honest, they'd start every convention story with the finding that nothing important happened that day and that your attention is not needed." His take was dead-on. And that was before we knew what kind of leaky journalism was going to ooze out of Denver.
Media Matters - The Denver media migraine {...}
Published: September 2, 2008, 3:52 pm - Indexed: September 2, 2008, 11:27 pm - Page Size: 27KB
Category: Society > Issues > Business > Media > Bias and Balance

]]> Society > Issues > Business > Media > Bias and Balance {NORTH AMERICA > REAL ESTATE} - >>> PHOTOGRAPHY EQUIPMENT AND STUDIO RENTAL <<< (san jose north) $35 2000sqft http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/california/metro-areas/san-francisco-bay-area/business-and-economy/real-estate/gt-gt-gt-photography-equipment-and-studio-rental-2008096423.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/california/metro-areas/san-francisco-bay-area/business-and-economy/real-estate/gt-gt-gt-photography-equipment-and-studio-rental-2008096423.htm Tue, 02 Sep 2008 05:37:32 GMT Check out myspace.com/darksideartists for our studio interior shots... Sfbay.Craigslist.Org >>> PHOTOGRAPHY EQUIPMENT AND STUDIO RENTAL <<< (san jose north) $35 2000sqft {new window}   Sfbay.Craigslist.Org - Check out myspace.com/darksideartists for our studio interior shots...
>>> PHOTOGRAPHY EQUIPMENT AND STUDIO RENTAL <<< {...}
Published: September 2, 2008, 5:37 am - Indexed: September 2, 2008, 8:48 am - Page Size: 4KB
Category: Regional > North America > United States > California > Metro Areas > San Francisco Bay Area > Business and Economy > Real Estate

]]> Regional > North America > United States > California > Metro Areas > San Francisco Bay Area > Business and Economy > Real Estate {EUROPE > NEWS AND MEDIA} - Splash photography http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/splash-photography-2008091755.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/splash-photography-2008091755.htm Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:17:27 GMT Travel: See the winning shots from our August photo competition, from Belize to Ambleside Guardian.Co.Uk Splash photography {new window}   Www.Guardian.Co.Uk - Travel: See the winning shots from our August photo competition, from Belize to Ambleside
Been there photo competition August 2008 | Travel | guardian.co.uk {...} This month's entries covered everywhere from Belize to the Isle of Wight. Here's our pick of the best shots. And don't forget to get your entries in for September's London-themed competition {...}
Published: September 1, 2008, 12:17 pm - Indexed: September 2, 2008, 8:54 am - Page Size: 21KB
Category: Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > News and Media

]]> Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > News and Media {NORTH AMERICA > REAL ESTATE} - Rent Salon Station OR Facial Room next to Wedding Gallery (richmond / seacliff) $800 http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/california/metro-areas/san-francisco-bay-area/business-and-economy/real-estate/rent-salon-station-or-facial-room-next-to-wedding-2008093483.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/california/metro-areas/san-francisco-bay-area/business-and-economy/real-estate/rent-salon-station-or-facial-room-next-to-wedding-2008093483.htm Mon, 01 Sep 2008 08:13:53 GMT We are a wedding galleria. We have a hair station for rent. You should have enough of your existing clients during the week to keep busy. Keep track of your own clients. Have the freedom to manage your own business, but with an established salon business and exciting wedding galleria here. We are very aggressive in advertising ourselves in print and visual media, concerts, wedding referrals, bridal shows, fashion shows, sponsorships, youtube, etc... You can also join our sales team and earn 5% commissions on our wedding photography packages and bridal gowns. Starting from $800-$5000. We'll train you. You must be licensed by California as a hair stylist and or makeup artist. If you can do both, the more chances you get booked. We work with lots of weddings and have fun do so! We refer bridal hair styling and makeup to supplement your income when it is high season. We offer training in our specialty for wedding styling. We attend Bridal shows where we meet hundreds of brides and give beauty trials at our booth. Join our team and see the many possibilities! Please call me for interview. Suzie 415-335-3522 http://www.salonstudio2000.com Sfbay.Craigslist.Org Rent Salon Station OR Facial Room next to Wedding Gallery (richmond / seacliff) $800 {new window}   Sfbay.Craigslist.Org - We are a wedding galleria. We have a hair station for rent. You should have enough of your existing clients during the week to keep busy. Keep track of your own clients. Have the freedom to manage your own business, but with an established salon business and exciting wedding galleria here. We are very aggressive in advertising ourselves in print and visual media, concerts, wedding referrals, bridal shows, fashion shows, sponsorships, youtube, etc... You can also join our sales team and earn 5% commissions on our wedding photography packages and bridal gowns. Starting from $800-$5000. We'll train you. You must be licensed by California as a hair stylist and or makeup artist. If you can do both, the more chances you get booked. We work with lots of weddings and have fun do so! We refer bridal hair styling and makeup to supplement your income when it is high season. We offer training in our specialty for wedding styling. We attend Bridal shows where we meet hundreds of brides and give beauty trials at our booth. Join our team and see the many possibilities! Please call me for interview. Suzie 415-335-3522 http://www.salonstudio2000.com
Rent Salon Station OR Facial Room next to Wedding Gallery {...}
Published: September 1, 2008, 8:13 am - Indexed: September 1, 2008, 1:40 pm - Page Size: 5KB
Category: Regional > North America > United States > California > Metro Areas > San Francisco Bay Area > Business and Economy > Real Estate

]]> Regional > North America > United States > California > Metro Areas > San Francisco Bay Area > Business and Economy > Real Estate