Manufacturing In The City

When I started out as journalist during the punk rock era the writers who were my friends and colleagues were publishing fanzines and independent books. There was a three tiered media system. With these fanzines being a direct part of the artistic community, the middle strata was made up of independent magazines that were able to pay a reasonable rate for stories and had adventurous editors, and the top level was the mainstream media, newspapers in the major cities and national magazines.

I quickly moved onto writing about architecture, design and technology but my approach to music stories was closer to urban studies than music criticism anyway. I was fascinated by the way that the punk rock musicians moved into abandoned and run down parts of the inner city in Melbourne and Sydney and created their own economy. Musicians made their own records and sold them to independent record stores, they were written about in the fanzines sold in these stores. The records were played on public radio. The bands set up run down and abandoned hotels as their own venues to perform in. It was a wide artistic community. Artists had studios in the inner city and set up temporary gallery spaces. Designers made clothes in back rooms of their stores or in workrooms in unfashionable inner city buildings. Film makers made videos for the bands and showed their short films at music venues. I liked the texture of city life, of manufacturing and residential and retail spaces and all mixed in together.

When I moved to New York in the late 1980’s I was writing principally for the British architecture magazine, Blueprint and I encountered a similar community. I was fascinated by the artists books sold at Printed Matter and the brochures and small publications I saw at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. The Storefront was still being run by its founder, Kyong Park, and he threw wild and lively parties. He had a knack for bringing together people who had everything or nothing in common and sparking debate. He made architecture seem like the most important and vital activity anyone could be involved with.

It was time when architects were rock stars and thanks to the goofy products of Philippe Starck industrial designers were nearly as famous. But Blueprint’s editor, Deyan Sudjic set the work of individual architects and designers within the fabric of the whole city, even the whole planet. I covered big stories: the opening of Royalton Hotel designed by Philippe Starck and the Guggenheim Museum’s plans to create international museums. But Deyan encouraged the smaller stories too and I wrote several features about the design exhibits at the Fashion Institute of Technology gallery on Seventh Avenue. I spent a lot of time with the late director, Richard Martin (who would go on to be the head of the Costume Department at the Metropolitan Museum) who showed me a lot of the clothing stored in the vaults and talked about the manufacturers and vendors in the neighbourhood. Manufacturing was winding down on Seventh Avenue and beginning to move out of the neighbourhood and even the city.

Last weekend at the library at Customs House I found a book called Endless Cities, which has a chapter by Deyan that talks about what Manhattan lost when the manufacturing moved out of the city. “Gentrification has always been a mixed blessing. In the crudest terms, it has never been popular among those who take a class-based view on development, and even for those who do not, there have been enough analytical studies to suggest that gentrification can be an employment killer. If Lower Manhattan’s warehouses had not been re-zoned for residential use – in the process allowing owners to capitalize on the increased value of their properties by driving out the small businesses specializing in tailoring, jewellery, printing and meat packing – there would be more jobs available in the city than there are today. It was such studies that provided the theoretical underpinning the Southwark’s stance. Explorations of the impact of gentrification in Manhattan have suggested that, although some streets may have been beautified and fashionable tourist attractions, coupled with zero-tolerance policy on crime, have helped to build a service economy, it has been at the expense of traditional industrial employers. High-income newcomers bring life of a certain kind into the city. It can be argued that successful cities are the ones attractive enough to persuade the market makers, the money brokers and the corporate rainmakers to move them. It can also be argued that their arrival serves to drive up property prices and to exclude those who grew up in them.”

The Value of Science Reporting

When I was at the open day at the Australian Museum last Sunday I spent a little time looking through a couple of shelves of human artifacts, ancient tools and early artworks. It made me think of how much art there is in science museums. Scientists study bones and geology and project what an animal might have looked like, what kind of skin it might have had. Soft tissue doesn’t fossilize, so these are projections. There was a story in the New York Times science section last week about an palaeoartist, Viktor Deak, who makes humanoid models for the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

“His 78-foot-long mural showing six million years’ worth of the proto-humans whose bony bits have been found in northeast Africa is coming to Manhattan in June as part of the exhibit “Lucy’s Legacy.” The exhibit’s centerpiece is the fossilized skeleton of Lucy — three million years old, less than four feet tall, hailing from the Afar Depression of Ethiopia and named after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” which was playing in the camp when she was found in 1974,” the story noted. “But his mural, a vast Photoshop collage, is more fun to ponder than the bones. The background uses thousands of his photos of vegetation, rocks, valleys and outcrops from the South Dakota badlands, the Puerto Rican jungle and the Wyoming prairie. Only one speck of it, a friend’s mother’s safari shot of faraway thorn trees, was actually snapped in Africa. But Ethiopia today, of course, no longer has the lush rainforest and grassy savannah of Ethiopia three million years ago, so Mr. Deak had to improvise. His landscape is filled with ape-men morphed from photos of his sculpted heads overlaid with photos of chimpanzee hair like a late-night hair restoration commercial, each one set atop the body of a human — usually Mr. Deak, his wife, or friends — in a primeval pose, then further adjusted to have longer arms, jutting buttocks or whatever is accurate.”

In 1976 The New York Times expanded the paper from two to four sections. The first section ran foreign and national news, the second, metropolitan news and the fourth, business and financial news. The third section had a different theme every weekday, Sports on Monday, Living on Wednesday, Home on Thursday, and Weekend on Friday. It was several months before Tuesday’s third section was given to Science. “Some on the business side of the newspaper argued for a style section that would emphasize fashion; they hoped it would attract more advertising,” recalled the Science Editor John Noble Wilford in 2003. “Abe Rosenthal [the Executive Editor] resisted. He wanted something more serious.” He also quotes from the memoirs of an assistant managing editor, Arthur Gelb: “Virtually every executive by now viewed the forthcoming four-part paper as the lifeboat that would rescue The Times and secure its future.”

We now know that this was a kind of “The Titanic is unsinkable” comment. These lavish print editions would eventually bankrupt media companies as advertising revenue fell away. Paper editions of newspapers all over the world are becoming extinct and no business model has emerged to support online news services. This might not matter much for news itself. Twitter is emerging as a source for breaking news from eye witnesses and people on the scene. Online publishers, like the Huffington Post, are creating a foundation to finance investigative reporting as well as verifying, indexing and collating Twitter and blog posts. Outside.in is geotagging posts from bloggers and media organisations, so we can find news by its location. Spot.us is creating a model for citizen funded city desk reporting, but last Sunday when I was reading blog posts through an RSS feeder on my iPhone before going to the open day at the Australian Museum I wondered what’s going to happen to science reporting.

John Noble Wilford had excellent writers at the New York Times. Some of them have written important books: Genius, James Gleick’s biography of physicist Richard Feynman. Natalie Angier’s The Canon: A Whirligig Tour Through The Beautiful Basics of Science, and her wry rehabilitation of the images of unsavoury creatures, The Beauty of the Beastly. Dennis Overbye’s Einstein in Love. And Margaret Mittelbach and David Crewdson’s examination of the Thylacine, Carnivorous Nights, which is set in Tasmania but begins in Sydney with a visit to the Australian Museum.

John Noble Wilford took a buyout offered by The New York Times a few years ago, and retired, he’s now in his 70’s and said that he’d continue to contribute stories on archaeology and paleontology. “In almost 40 years at The Times, and several previous years of science journalism, I have reported many big stories: Going to the Moon, to Mars and to the outer planets of the solar system,” he wrote in 2003. “Also, the discoveries of planets around other stars, the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, and fossils and temple ruins of all kinds. Many times I found myself a little breathless and pinching myself to make sure I was not dreaming. I suppose I felt this most acutely when covering the exploits of interplanetary spacecraft, like Viking and Voyager: to be seeing the other planets up close, as worlds and not specks of light in the night, that was really exciting. To think that we at this time in history are traveling through our surrogate spacecraft out to the farthest reaches of the solar system, all for the first time, that gives you a feeling of being part of a special time in human history. It is often difficult to judge which discoveries will prove to be most significant in terms of improving human life. For example, no one knew at the time, the 1890’s, or for decades afterward that the discovery of the electron, thought at the time to be of no practical benefit, would be a foundation of modern telecommunications and data processing and storage. That transformation has occurred during the years of my reporting career, and it is certainly a change of tremendous importance in the way we live and work and think. (I sometimes have my doubts about how it’s improving life when I’m trapped in a room or train with people yakking incessantly on their cellphones!) Another train of discoveries, including the structure of DNA, genome mapping and other advances in microbiology, promises to lead to sweeping improvements in preventing and fighting human diseases. But as research in these areas proceeds, we must expect doubts and debate over social, political and ethical issues never before faced in human society. That will be one of the great challenges of the 21st century.”

A reader asked him about the need to consider research across disciplines: “The day of the polymath or renaissance man or woman is long past,” he replied. “One is not simply a physicist, but an astrophysics or geophysicist or biophysicist, etc. Indeed, even those specialties are themselves broad fields subdivided by many more specialized pursuits. For a young person the surest way to success in science, it seems, is to define your goals narrowly enough to get some quick answers or solutions. And sometimes scientists who think more broadly are criticized as being too thinly stretched in their work to be taken seriously. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that individual scientists pursue their research disciplines in a fairly focused way, but in an institutional environment where at some intermediate level there is an exchange of ideas and results among various disciplines.”

Another reader asked what qualifications are needed for a science writer: “In my generation, immediate post-Sputnik, most science writers were reporters who were retrofitted for science or medicine,” he wrote. “That was my experience. In the last couple of decades, though, our science reporters enter the field with more substantial academic credentials in the sciences. A few have M.D.s or Ph.D.s in one of the sciences. These people obviously have some advantages over the non-science trained reporters. They already know much of the language of science, the traditions and procedures of research, the questions and problems. But bear in mind that a science writer does not specialize in one small area of science, the way scientists are often trained to do. A science writer must be ready and able to swing from astronomy one day to geophysics the next and then anthropology, etc. So a person at a liberal arts college might consider majoring in a broad science and take several courses in other sciences. But take English, history and such. And get plenty of experience writing for lay audiences. Knowledge of science is of no value if one cannot express and explain in clear English and in an arresting style.”

Open Day At The Australian Museum

The Open Day at the Australian Museum yesterday was crammed with families with small children. The displays in the research centre were kid friendly. We could pick up the bones of birds and feel how they were almost weightless. We could stroke the fur of the taxidermy animals, as long as we went with the direction it had grown in. We could listen to a museum staffer talking about how they collect samples of marine plants in the oceans. There’s a part of me that reverts to a second childhood when I visit the Australian Museum, which is often, I’m a member and I live in the neighbourhood. I was obsessed with science when I was growing up in the Flinders Ranges, collecting fossils and meteorites but there were almost no resources at my small rural school that could help me identify them and the only teacher I had who was deeply immersed in science was a physicist. He directed my interests towards mathematics and cosmology. I’m now drawn to all of the things I wished I’d had access to when I was a child.

But mostly at the Australian Museum I’m drawn to the sophisticated installations that are as conceptually elegant and intellectually engaging as anything you’d find at an art museum. In the Climate Change exhibit there are glass vases with pieces of coral in them, showing the progressive effects of rising acidity in the ocean. They’re as beautiful, and beautifully displayed, as the broken vessels and statues with missing arms and legs in exhibits of Greek and Roman art. There’s a case where taxidermy birds are laid out as they are in the research division, flat on their backs, with tags tied to their legs. It reminded me of an installation by the artist Mark Dion, making a similar point about the effects of climate change on animals. He’d hung taxidermy animals from the branches of a tree, as if they’d been lynched.

In her book The Canon, The New York Times science writer Natalie Angier lamented the perception that science museums are something we grow out of: “When the second of her two children turned thirteen, my sister decided that it finally was time to let their membership lapse in two familiar family haunts: the science museum and the zoo,” she wrote. “These were kiddie places, she told me. Her children now had more mature tastes. They liked refined forms of entertainment: art museums, the theatre, ballet. Isn’t that something? My sister’s children’s bodies were lengthening and so were their attention spans. They could sit for hours at a performance of Macbeth without so much as checking the seat bottom for fossilized wads of gum. No more of this mad pinball pinging from one hands-on science exhibit to the next, pounding on knobs to make artificial earthquakes, or cranking gears to see Newton’s laws in motion, or something like that.”

There are noisy, vividly colourful and goofy elements in the exhibitions at the Australian and Powerhouse Museums that are designed to engage small children. But we adults often can’t appreciate the quieter and more profound elements of the exhibitions because we’re no longer smart enough to comprehend them. We’ve consigned the sense of wonder and the joy in figuring things out exclusively to childhood. “Are you saying that’s it for learning about nature?” Natalie Angier says she asked her sister. “They know everything they need to know about the universe, the cell, the atom, electromagnetism, geodes, trilobites, chromosomes, and Foucault pendulums, which even Stephen Jay Gould once told me had trouble understanding?”

As adults we appreciate the practical value of art, a frieze on an ancient Greek vase that illustrates a sequence from the Odyssey, perhaps the scene where the sailors are drugged and distracted by the narcotic plants that the Lotus Eaters consume, teaches us something about being aware of what’s going on around us and taking responsibility for our actions. We can see the contemporary truths in the same myth quoted in a song by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. But, at our peril, we’ve abandoned finding insights in artifacts in science museums.

There’s a report on the front page of the Daily Telegraph today that says in the last 11 months there have been 10,000 power outages in Sydney causing 1.4 million minutes of lost power, and almost all were caused by equipment failure. The Australian and Powerhouse Museums can help us evaluate this news: what type of equipment is it, how does it work, should it be replaced by a different technology or an entirely different source of power? How does our power consumption in the past year compare with previous years? Are there new kinds of equipment, consumer electronics perhaps, that are draining energy? Or are there different causes of energy surges: more lights and surveillance equipment in some areas to cover increased interest in public safety perhaps?

I began to think about infrastructure more carefully when I went to the All Tomorrow’s Parties Festival on Cockatoo Island during the Sydney Festival in January. I no longer do very much journalism at all but my niche is technology: robotics, the algorithms that underpin activities on the internet, the mathematics of cloud computing and content distribution. We can take apart an iPhone and still have no idea how it works, the mechanisms can’t be seen by the naked eye and we couldn’t comprehend how they work even if we put them under a powerful microscope. But I do a lot of research on these systems, the scientists who are doing the experiments that improve the systems and equipment and materials, the venture capitalists who fund their move into the market, and the artists who work with them to figure out how they might be function and I read the writers who are thinking about the social and environmental and cultural consequences of the adoption of new technologies.

I can look at an iPhone and know where to start to find out how it’s made and how it works. But I realised, on Cockatoo Island, that I no longer understand the machines of the Industrial Revolution. I looked at the remnants of machinery there and they reminded me of artworks: a winch that looks like the Alexander Calder Stabile on George Street, the rusted boxes with cutouts, covering transformers, reminded me of Donald Judd’s furniture. And I couldn’t remember the physics I’d need to work out how the turbines functioned. I went to the Powerhouse Museum a couple of months later, to see the clothing by Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake and Comme des Garcons that Gene Sherman had donated, but I spent most of my time in the Steam Engines exhibit. I relearned the science I needed to understand the power grid and transport systems and buildings around me, by working the machinery and reading the placards. But this was connected to the Japanese clothing too, these designers consider their art one of manufacturing, not craft.

The Open Day at the Australian Museum was simply wondrous. I spent some time looking at the taxidermy of a Tasmanian Devil and stroked its fur (in the right direction). The delight never fades that at science museums I can get up close to things, touch them, and investigate them thoroughly. There are reports online about the Museum’s scientific research into the plight of the Tasmanian Devil. Evolutionary and Conservation Genetics of Marsupials is a project that started this year that’s a collaboration between several instutions, including The Australian Museum. “This multifaceted project uses modern hypervariable molecular genetic markers to examine the molecular ecology of Australasian marsupials, including an assessment of levels of genetic diversity , impact of isolation and habitat fragmentation, phylogeography, taxonomy, population structure and mating systems, as well as levels of dispersal and gene flow. These data not only increase our understanding of the evolutionary history and natural population processes of these species, but also aid in conservation and management.”

Being able to walk through the Collections and Research Building I could see how how much studying the natural world has changed since the museum was founded in 1845. On the first floor there are taxidermy mammals on foam trays or padded cloth donuts in filing cabinets with paper tags tied to their legs. On the second floor are the DNA labs. We have the historical field knowledge of healthy, abundant populations of Tasmanian Devils and the ability to study carefully the genetic makeup of the remaining populations and the disease that’s destroying them. The Australian Museum makes these worlds intersect.

Business Models to Support Community Journalism

Venture capitalists are set up to stay with a company while it develops a community and becomes a valuable tool, regardless of whether there seems any way of making people pay to use the service. Twitter is an excellent example. At first it was even impossible to describe: haiku like posts of 140 characters or less. You ‘follow’ people whose thoughts interest you and they make random observations: they tell you what books they’re reading, that they’re having pancakes for breakfast, complain that it’s always their turn to walk the dog. Now people increasingly turn to Twitter first for news. It’s a news ticker on your phone and it’s superseding CNN. It’s a different kind of news, fine-grained and high resolution, real time reports from the people involved in the terror attack in Mumbai last year, and the recent Iranian election. Last week at a press briefing at the White House, President Obama called on a reporter from the Huffington Post who’d been monitoring and checking the tweets and asked him what questions people in Iran might want to ask him. The service is becoming richer. People ‘re-tweet’ links to articles and blog posts. And businesses are using Twitter as a source of advertising. There’s a Korean BBQ taco truck in Los Angeles that tweets its location to let its customers know where it will be. But there isn’t a business model yet. Last week venture capitalist Fred Wilson, whose company Union Square Ventures invests in Twitter, said in an interview that the founders of Twitter don’t intend to charge the people using the service, that they’re thinking about premium services perhaps. A business model will develop in time.

Union Square Ventures invests in several social media companies. The local news aggregator outside.in, is another, and it too has a slowly developing business model while most people use the service for free. Posts are tagged to their geographic location and the outside.in site has a Google map rather than an indexis. News is searched for and valued by its proximity to you. Outside.in is transforming the community newspaper with a new publisher’s service. Publishers can aggregate and curate content from blogs, add in some original reporting and sell advertising around it.

“Outside.in wants to help local news sites by supplying them with a river of extra content created by local bloggers, Twitterers and lots of people who don’t even think of themselves as content creators, like people who post real estate listings. The local site is supposed to aggregate and filter the stuff and sell ads on it. The people supplying the content get more exposure via links from the bigger site.”

But I envisage something different. The gritty, important, intense city desk reporting is done by a service like Spot.us and pinned to the map without needing to be passed through a traditional publishing service. And there is no traditional advertising: where businesses are asked to buy space that’s priced according to how many readers click through to read stories or view ads. There needs to be a new value chain, one that takes advantage of the GPS systems in mobile phones.

I have no idea how many people read blogs on their iPhones rather than their computers. In my neighbourhood in Potts Point, when I’m having coffee at Toby’s Estate roughly two thirds of the people around me are reading from their iPhones. I read blogs exclusively on my iPhone now I have an RSS application. And the two blogs I rely on most, City of Sound and Super Colossal, are based in Sydney. Both provide rich content and links. They remind me of the architecture magazine, Blueprint, that I used to write for in the late 1980’s, architecture is placed in the centre of circles that radiate out, the neighbourhood, the city, the world, the universe.

What I want is a marketing program that uses GPS co-ordinates to tell me where I can buy the books they mention, tickets for the events they write about in my neighbourhood. Not the Google adsense program that blankets a page with general ads but something specific. The blogger can choose to have the tags for their posts mined for this marketing information and the local businesses would opt in.

Disruptive Innovation and Journalism

Mitch Kapoor, the creator of Lotus 1-2-3, writes about new business models for journalism:

I don’t have a crystal ball, but I do have a perspective coming from 30 years of watching disruptive innovation via information technology overturn old industries and give rise to new ones. Newspapers as we’ve known them are doomed. The conditions which supported their business model have disappeared. This is sad for people in the business and those who love newspapers, but it would be a giant mistake to equate the death of newspapers with the death of journalism. This kind of over-identification obscures important questions of how journalism will be reinvented in the internet era, and what kinds of business models will sustain it. Nothing is certain, but appetite for news continues to grow. Firms do make money using the internet. We are in a fertile period of experimentation out of which it seems likely to me, workable new forms of reporting the news will emerge. If experience is a guide, opportunities are more likely to be seized and defined by startups than incumbents. This theme was identified by Clay Cristensen in “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and holds true in this case. New cost structures, new use of tools and infrastructure, new ideas about what content bundles are meaningful will all play a role in what emerges. It’s a difficult and painful time for those in an industry which is failing, and an exciting time for new entrants.

Beyond the Special Advertising Supplement

Harold Koda Goddess

Sometime last year I took a copy of the Los Angeles Times off the newspaper rack at the Customs House library. I picked up what I took to be an advertising supplement. There were advertisements for clothing from multi-national glamour brands and perfumes. And the stories were about shopping and had illustrations that could looked like advertising images. It was a while before I discovered that this was a new editorial section, a Style liftout.

In the past the “Special Advertising Section” of newspapers and magazines has been nothing but this kind of shallow and glossy salesmanship. But what if this concept could create something more substantial, along the lines of the National Geographic Corporation sponsoring the missions of explorers?

This is an issue that the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum in New York faces when it creates exhibitions around the clothing of living designers. Should they accept sponsorship from the design companies? Does it compromise the scholarly work? The curators, Harold Koda and the colleague he succeeded, the late Richard Martin, brought a scholarly rigour into the examination of contemporary fashion.

“Richard’s major contribution to costume studies was his ability to input vigour and academic interest from his art history background,” said Harold Koda. “He saw fashion design as a manifestation that had richness of content that could be analyzed the way an art object was analyzed. He didn’t see any kind of contradiction in that. Costume exhibitions were transformed because of his work.” They also added to the Costume Institute’s collection by accepting donations of clothing from designers and their clients.

When they were the curators at the Fashion Institute of Technology, they created an exhibition called East Village. “East Village was the best example of what Richard Martin did so well,” his colleague Laura Sinderbrand said. “There was a wall of painting, sculpture, music and the club scene. It was avant garde and off the 57th Street Madison Avenue scene. We showed work produced by young people in the East Village. To eat, they had to produce wearable art because they couldn’t exist on fine art alone. Many produced clothing and jewellery that was outrageous and wonderful.”

Harold Koda was asked what he wants the public to take away from exhibitions at the Costume Institute: “A new way of looking at clothes. I find that the general public seems to have a much more evolved understanding of costume shows than when Mrs Vreeland was the creative consultant of the department in the ‘70s and ’80’s. They’re increasingly educated about historical fashion and even more so about contemporary fashion. Many museums that have been rather lackadaisical about acknowledging their costume and textile collections are realizing the rich opportunities in their holdings now, and reaching out to this broader audience of the fashion hungry.”

Latitude Longitude Sydney

33°53’S 151°10’E

 

Outside.in

This is the official name of my City Desk publication. It’s the latitude and longitude for Sydney. I don’t expect it to be said out loud, it’ll just be referred to by it’s nickname, the city desk. It won’t be a paper publication. If I had access to the Outside.in platform in Sydney locations and geotags and co-ordinates would be all I’d need for readers to find my publication. I’d be doing exactly what Fred Wilson (whose venture capital firm invests in Outside.in) said he’d do if he were creating the equivalent to The Village Voice in New York today.

 

“If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything. I would not hire a ton of writers. I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I’d go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them. I’d do a bit of original reporting on the big stories but most of what I’d do would be smart curation, with a voice, and an opinion.”

My interest is in that “original reporting” and what kind of marketplace can support the hiring of editors. In fact I’d have an entirely different kind of staff, with several editors on staff to work directly with writers and artists, and a lot of freelancers. And I’d have app developers, on staff if I could figure out how to afford them.

Spot.us is helping to figure out how to create and fund the investigative reporting covering community issues, with tips and funding from the community. I learned on Friday from its founder, David Cohn, that there are other people in Australia also looking at applying the model locally and I’m going to see if I can collaborate with them.

The revenue model for the Outside.in publishing platform for local news is still the selling of ads:

“The local site is supposed to aggregate and filter the stuff and sell ads on it. The people supplying the content get more exposure via links from the bigger site. Now back to [outside.in CEO] Josephson’s news site of the future: He imagines that the tiny editorial staff of the model newspaper produces an extraordinary number of page views – 40 million per month, in this example – and then augments it with twice as many page views from a third party network (which could be, but doesn’t have to be, supplied by Outside.in). A sales force of a dozen people sells ads for both buckets of inventory, and uses ad networks to fill in remnant space they don’t sell.”

What I’m looking at is the possibility of a different kind of revenue stream for freelance journalism that’s a co-operation between publishers and local businesses. The original reporting that interests me is arts, science and design criticism that stems from a journalist’s deep immersion in the worlds that they write about, that might expand a blog’s content — as the architecture critic Geoff Manaugh’s BLDGBLOG book has done. These writers are constantly researching, evaluating, reading, going to concerts, visiting exhibitions, looking deeply into the collections of museums. What if there was a way for the kind of long form reporting that doesn’t suit the web, to be easily and inexpensively produced in booklet form that could be sold in bookstores and museum stores?

I’d create an iPhone app that’s a deep inventory of all of these little publications. People could order reprints of these booklets, if they were out of print, and have them mailed within a week. The revolutionary aspect would be instant royalty payments, that once the purchase had been made a part of my bookkeeping programme would instantly calculate and pay royalties for the writers and repayments to anyone who might have invested in the creation of the booklet.

For instance approaching the Australian Museum to create a small publication about the Tasmanian Devil based on its research. A writer could be assigned to the relevant researchers at the museum, editors hired to evaluate both the science and the writing. The booklet could be funded by the Australian Museum, or Museum Members, and the proceeds shared between the Museum, the writer, a donation to the programmes trying to save the Tasmanian Devil from extinction, and a small amount put back into the operating costs.

Vaniman Panoramas at the State Library of New South Wales

When I was standing in front of Melvin Vaniman’s panorama of the section of Sydney on George Street around the Sydney Town Hall and Queen Victoria Building at first it didn’t seem like much at all. I’ve been immersing myself in episodes of Spooks I’ve been borrowing from Video EZY and aerial sweeps of London, at the roof level of Vaniman’s photographs or overhead, are standard. And I can do something similar with Google Map Street View on my iPhone. But Vaniman’s photograph was taken in 1904. The Wright Brothers had only taken to the air the year before, and it would be another 64 years before we saw the whole Earth, photographed from the Moon’s orbit by the Apollo 8 crew. The defining view of our age is the tracking shot over the “Hades” cityscape at the beginning of Blade Runner that’s a 2019 equivalent to a Vaniman panorama. That’s when the Vaniman panorama suddenly became wondrous. I could look back in time with the perspective of my own time.

It’s hard not be charmed by someone described as “an American adventurer, singer, balloonist, and photographer.” And adventurers often have to create their own tools. My hero is Dr Robert Ballard, the deep sea ocean explorer who is best known for discovering the wreck of the Titanic. He’s made great contributions to the field of telerobotics with the robot submersibles and communications tracking devices he’s helped develop for his missions. Half my time is spent exploring, he said, and half the time building new tools to do it next time. Vaniman built his own tools too: “His panoramic photographs were nearly always taken from high above the ground and if a nearby building or ship’s mast was not at hand, he erected his own 30-metre pole to achieve a bird’s eye view. When his trusty pole didn’t give him the height necessary to photograph the entire city of Sydney in a single sweep, he imported a balloon from America and spent months tethered 180 metres above North Sydney, experimenting with the new perspective. Vaniman even built his own camera, able to record panoramic views on film up to two metres in length and 50 cm wide in a single shot.”

It genuinely feels like entering another time to stand in front of the panorama of wheat harvesting at Narramine Station in 1903. One hundred years might be a thousand years: the changes from that time until now are extraordinary.

Melvin Vaniman Panoramas at the State Library of New South Wales

The Nature Portraits of Reg Mombassa

 

Reg Mombassa’s remarkable new exhibition at Watters Gallery could be a relic from the future. If we go forward 200 years these artworks will be a chronicle of the flora and fauna of our time and how we viewed and valued them. In 1836 in Australia Charles Darwin was intrigued by a platypus and it sowed the seeds of what would become his theory of evolution. In an exhibition at the State Library of New South Wales there’s a report of him seeing a platypus and although it reminded him of a European water rat it was clearly a different species. “Would the Creator, mused Darwin, create an entirely different species in the antipodes with similar adaptions? Why not just place the water-rat in Australia? A similar thought occurred about the potoroo, which acted very much like a rabbit.” This was the genesis of Darwin’s theory that “species are not created once and for all but adapt to their environment.”

Early European visitors to Australia were generally astonished by the flora and fauna and didn’t know what to make of it. Artworks from the nineteenth century show that the artists were bewildered: this “monkey or bear of New South Wales” drawn by William Govett in the 1830’s must surely be a koala. Reg’s animal portraits show what happened next. European settlers brought in sheep and cattle and chickens to tame and re-shape the wilderness in the form of the world they’d left. The consequence was a confused hybrid world. There are portraits of animals that are part kangaroo, kiwi and sheep. Native Australian animals have been absorbed into the national identity. A kangaroo and kiwi in World War I uniforms smoke cigarettes together. But mostly Reg’s portraits restore dignity to the native animals by presenting them in all of their wonderful oddness.

The European settlers came to Australia during the Industrial Revolution when the British way was dominion, bending all life and nature to their will, believing it was God’s will. Australia was never entirely tamed and Reg’s tableaux of Australian Jesus show a divine presence as confused as the artist who drew the koala as a monkey or bear. Australian Jesus creates rituals around drinking beer, playing football and having barbeques but frequently seems lost and ineffectual. The native Australian animals, however, always draw around him, as if to comfort him.

While travelling through the countryside Reg draws the scenery in the way that other people take photographs. There are many drawings as small as holiday snapshots of trees seen from highways and power pylons and ordinary houses. But at this moment in time nature is not idyllic and the landscapes are punctuated with nightmare scenes of monsters cavorting in toxic waste. Catastrophe seems imminent. Australian Jesus is pictured taking an inventory as sheep, platypuses, ringtail possums, cattle, koalas and chickens are loaded onto an ark whose cabin is a suburban house. The most beautiful drawings are requiems, sketches taken from newspaper photographs of the landscape destroyed in the Victorian bushfires.

At Watters Gallery until July 11

109 Riley Street East Sydney NSW 2010 Ph: (02) 9331 2556

Hours: 10am – 5pm Tuesday and Saturday; 10am – 7pm Wed, Thur, Fri

The Freelance Economy

David Cohn who created Spot.Us emailed me to say that it’s possible to create a version of the project in Sydney. The code is available for the site and in the last couple of days I’ve been able to think of little else, imagining it already up and running. Consider this post the starting point.

Something David wrote in a blog post today establishes why I want to set this up. A reporter named Sean Maher created a report on the pothole crisis in Oakland. It was pitched and funded through Spot.Us but in collaboration with The Oakland Tribune, which ran it on the front page. The Managing Editor for the Oakland Tribune, Martin Reynolds, says: “One thing that we liked is that this platform is a real opportunity for freelance journalists to get paid a little bit better than they would otherwise, so as a mainstream publication, we felt it was important to support those working journalists out there.”

The great pity in the failure of the media industry in Australia is that there are many good freelance reporters and critics and editors whose perspective is valuable who have no business structure to support their work. In the 1980’s when I was beginning a career as a freelance journalist, newspapers had excellent editors who gave me a steady stream of feature stories, there was a second tier of successful independent magazines who were able to pay reasonable freelance rates, and a network of public radio stations and fanzines creating extraordinary programmes and publications with volunteers that energised the whole media spectrum. There was a lot of movement and support between the different stratas.

The reality we face in Australia is that it’s a small market. A new network market for freelance journalism isn’t likely to contain anything from the old system except public radio and fanzines (which now includes blogs). A quality of that market of the 1980’s that can still exist, and may well be the key to everything now, is small collaborative entrepreneurial projects. The 1980’s were the punk rock era, and when bands put out their own independent records they used artwork from artist friends, liner notes from writer friends, and there was a market place of independently operated music venues, and record, book and clothing stores where people could sell and buy works.

I need to figure out how to map a contemporary equivalent of that network to see where the opportunities are and look at adapting the Spot.Us system of pitching and funding stories. I had imagined freelance journalism mostly existing as small brochure length printed projects sold in museum and gallery bookstores. But the Oakland Tribune example, of finding a way to augment what publications are able to offer freelancers is an excellent concept worth figuring out how to adopt locally. Spot.us suggests to freelancers that if an editor rejects a piece purely because of monetary concerns that the pitch can be listed and search for its own funding.

Spot.us has a pricing guideline based on competitive rates and although I’ve been out of the freelance market in Australia for a couple of years I’m not sure that the concept of competitive rates would apply here. My sense is that an independent pricing structure needs to be established. Maybe it’s an algorithm calculating equivalences between different professions and deciding what a fair price is for a journalist for a particular project. I wonder about the definition of “freelance”: is it someone trying to make an entire living wage from journalism, or a part-timer publishing the odd piece based on expertise within a certain niche? Does the distinction matter and should it play into figuring a pricing strategy?

I imagine that the brochure length books can create their own revenue stream and it seems important to deduct a small royalty from all of these projects to fund an eventual programme that has the same aim as the MacArthur Foundation’s Genius Grants, where people with unusual and special skills and expertise can work on projects that are entirely curiosity led. The urban critic Mike Davis and classical music critic Alex Ross have both been awarded Genius Grants, and are fine examples of the value of funding curiosity led reporting.

But that’s a long way off. Perhaps a good beginning point is to just create some test projects and track them, simulate them as Spot.us style projects, and monitor everything about them. How much time they take, the costs involved in the reporting, the equipment needed for reporting, the editorial process, and to put together the story and then bring in a range of people to evaluate the process and the results.