Posts by Sacha
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to nzlemming,
sure, but can you imagine the queue?
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Gareth Ward,
The Auckland Plan will include a Highline-like redevelopment of that off-ramp. I don't know that access to it has been sorted
Maybe one of these?
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Michael Nielson offers a broader - and quite compassionate - view of disruptive industry change (from a couple of years ago).
It’s true that stupidity and malevolence do sometimes play a role in the disruption of industries. But in the first part of this essay I’ll argue that even smart and good organizations can fail in the face of disruptive change, and that there are common underlying structural reasons why that’s the case.
...The result is that the newspapers are locked into producing a product that’s of comparable quality (from an advertiser’s point of view) to the top blogs, but at far greater cost. And yet all their decisions – like the decision to spend a lot on photography – are entirely sensible business decisions. Even if they’re smart and good, they’re caught on the horns of a cruel dilemma.
The same basic story can be told about the dispruption of the music industry, the minicomputer industry, and many other disruptions. Each industry has (or had) a standard organizational architecture. That organizational architecture is close to optimal, in the sense that small changes mostly make things worse, not better. Everyone in the industry uses some close variant of that architecture. Then a new technology emerges and creates the possibility for a radically different organizational architecture, using an entirely different combination of skills and relationships. The only way to get from one organizational architecture to the other is to make drastic, painful changes. The money and power that come from commitment to an existing organizational architecture actually place incumbents at a disadvantage, locking them in.
He predicts similar disruption for scientific publishing, interesting in light of George Monbiot's article this week about the nutty model for academic publishers.
You might resent Murdoch's paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier's journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That'll be $31.50.
...Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free. The material they publish was commissioned and funded not by them but by us, through government research grants and academic stipends. But to see it, we must pay again, and through the nose.
The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier's operating profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2bn). They result from a stranglehold on the market. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Russell Brown,
Might he not, in a sane moment, look at that sentence and wonder about himself?
Probably wonders why he's not living it up in some caliphate with the adoration and respect he so richly deserves, and none of those uppity wimmin on the roads.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
the old model of the handful of outlets serving as "gatekeepers" is breaking down
a stressed business model then, perhaps?
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
So how would you explain what has changed?
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Russell Brown,
That's very much the TV news mindset.
I'd suggest it's old media culture in general when you look at their sneering responses over the last decade to the idea of 'blogs' or 'citizen journalism'. Again, more about a stressed business model.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Russell Brown,
This says to me that the architects had no idea what people actually do on K Road. Had they ever been there at night?
I'd hate to think what Opus would bill for the overtime.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to recordari,
'Hydrocarbon Cabana'
very good. gas-mask on entry
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Patrick Reynolds,
What we need there is a lift down to the disused off-ramp [embarrassing as, NZTA] and let's turn it into a long curving bar [with real good air-con] so we can sit there supping drinks and look upon the poor souls out there stuck in their cars on the motorway....
Sounds like a viable business proposition (sadism being evergreen); could fit well with the proposed park on the ramp.