Recently hit up the Atacama desert to explore one of the driest regions on earth. An exciting trip, I will write an article on the technology of the ALMA observatory when I make a minute, until then click here for some photos:
The Problem
The old press model of paperback sales and ads no longer works. It has been picked apart by the loss of classifieds to online networks (craigslist) and falling sales, as people flock to online content. There will always be a need for the news, but the revenue being generated is not sufficient for the journalistic standards leading content creators are trying to provide. In an attempt to increase revenues and reverse the course of decline, News Corps. CEO Rupert Murdoch has announced pay walls on all their online content. In this post, I look any precedence to this and whether a pay wall is a practical step to cut their losses.
Precedence
The New York Times has previously attempted throwing up a pay wall around columnist content, only to find their readership diminish, stock plummet and the need to reverse their decision, abandoning the strategy.
At the same time the Huffington Post was created, recently becoming the most linked to blog online, with over 22 million visitors a month, many of whom were likely readers that jumped ship from the New York Times due to the new pay wall cost model.
Perhaps though the best example to look at would be the ever smaller record sales of the music industry. The sale of CD’s is down by about a half since it’s 1999 high and only set to decrease. The records industry was slow to react to the disruptive effects of the Internet and tried to impose paid for music only long after the concept of free had caught traction amongst the web savvy. Now the industry finds itself on the defence, loosing sales and distribution leverage to i-tunes and promotional leverage to blogs (to be discussed in a latter analysis of the democratisation of music). Instead of innovating, the industry went after the users in legal tangles whilst sales continued to fall.
In a similarly precarious position, news organisations are now desperately reaching for the same strategy adopted by the music bosses.
WHY People will not pay (enough) for news
Murdoch’s papers will be able to generate revenue for subscriptions, just as they have from advertising, but it will not be enough. User’s with access to news aggregate services such as Google News, as well as the availability of high quality news content from other portals, such as the BBC, means attention will turn elsewhere.
The journalistic content of the WSJ and Financial Times are superior to many other services offered by competitors, but not to most readers when price point is considered. This means that in effect Murdoch’s news empire will be taking a step backwards against it’s competition, once a pay wall has been imposed. More than anything, the fact that News Corps websites will charge for content is a sign the news industry is running out of options.
The online advertising model has not worked for the industry, as advertisers are not as attracted to more open ended advertising, when they can target specific verticles through search engines (what would you advertise for next to an article regarding the war in Afghanistan?)
Why Google and users should care
As Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, wrote in a letter to the WSJ last year ‘a crisis for news-gathering is not just a crisis for the newspaper industry. The flow of accurate information, diverse views and proper analysis is critical for a functioning democracy.’
Towards the end of last year Rupert Murdoch of News Corp attacked Google, under the pretense that news aggregate services who pay nothing for content and are guilty of ‘theft’, failing to recognise the pivotal role Google plays in bringing users to its website (Google redirects 100,000 users a minute through their Google News service to news websites.)
In turn, as one google employee told me when I visited their offices in London ‘the problem’s that we don’t create the high quality content they do, we simply index it for users to find.’ Without search engines, people will not find the content, without the content there is nothing for the news aggregation services to find.
What the future holds
Blaming or going up against Google is barking up the wrong tree, especially when pulling the plug on their indexing would mean pulling the plug on your own readership. Perhaps the most obvious first step would be acting with a common voice, News Corps, Reuters, AP and other leading syndicates should approach the issues as a single voice to leverage consumers and web aggregate services. This however is somewhat undermined by the appearance of highly successful online blogs such as the Huffington Post.
As Clay Shirky wrote in his fantastic article on the subject ‘Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable.’ If anything is for certain it is that the current model of printed newspapers is unsustainable, due to the high-cost of production and the simple facts described above.
Eric Schmidt wrote in the same letter previously mentioned:
‘I certainly don’t believe that the Internet will mean the death of news. Through innovation and technology, it can endure with new found profitability and vitality. Video didn’t kill the radio star. It created a whole new additional industry.’
One trend poised to take the printing market by storm are the E-readers, kindles and other portable reading devices that have begun to inundate the market. Though this is a viable solution to the high cost of printing, new questions regarding the ease of copying material are sure to surface. One way or another the role News Corps and other leading publications have to play in the contemporary news industry is increasingly unclear.
These two articles on disruption and the free business model are essential reading for internet neophiles!
http://abovethecrowd.com/2009/07/15/bill-gurley-on-the-free-business-model/
This Shirky article is also very interesting, it reviews much of what the big publications got wrong:
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
We woke up early the day after to enter dead horse point state park for sunrise colors pulling in just after the moon had set and stood on the precipice, assured that the day before had not been a figment of our imagination. After absorbing the views we headed back to canyonlands, to upheaval dome, the location of a possible asteroid collision millions of years ago that has left a large scar in the land on the edge of the canyons.
We relished the size of canyonlands as we lay out on the rocks, stretching our sore bodies in the warm glow of the sun before saying goodbye to the canyons and heading north to the I-70. The I-70 is a highway I had grown to know rather well as I had lived overlooking it in Vail. What a contrast four hours driving could make! I knew due east of the junction we turned on to stood the snowy peaks of the rockies, a sharp contrast to the desolate red of the desert, punctuated by the occasional fault. We headed west on the I-70, pulling out in an erie town named green river, due to it’s location on the river banks. We finally gave in and payed for camping, spending the afternoon relaxing on the grass and checking out the rather odd town, which had certainly seen better days in the past. Bellies full after a rather large dinner we revelled in the calm of the campsite and the fact that we didn’t have to rise at dawn for the first time in a while. The next day we drove west then left the I-70 to follow the road south along a huge fault line that rises out of the desert in the same thornlike manner as that behind the town of moab.
At the southern end of this fold in the earths crust lies Capitol Reef national park and our eventual destination. The park is surrounded by mountains to the west and south and resembles a plateau on a tilt, sticking out of the yellowish hues of the desert before abruptly dropping to the ground in the form of 1600 foot cliffs. This slanted plateau has been carved out over eons much like the rest of Utahs sandstone formations, leaving verdant green valleys surrounded by pinnacles and walls that have shades of red, yellow, orange and grey stricken across their faces. We passed through the park towards the west, then drove south along the giant red faces of where the rise meets the plain again, turning into a small canyon to hike. We scaled around 1000 feet of the rocks to a lookout, with the ‘golden throne’ an enormous rock to our right, the plains of the desert in front of us and the mountains to our left. We sat there for a while, now accustomed to height we dangled our feet off the edge of one of the precipices until the sun was low in the sky and the temperature began to drop. Returning to the car we drove back across the park and found a small spot to camp near a creek, punching in and passing out for the night. We planned on doing some backcountry hiking the following day, but the weather forecast turned so we settled for a 9 mile hike to the top of the giant cliffs, a steep elevation change of 1600 feet, but most certainly not beyond our abilities. We walked along the cliffs for miles on end as we turned corners and continued to rise. Finally after several hours we reached the navajo knobs our eventual destination. While not the unending view offered by canyonlands, Capitol reef has its own charms hidden within it’s unusual formations, incredible colors and vivid greens. I sat on the roof of that little world for a while as I waited for Jackie to walk along the cliffs to a particularly prominent point so that I could try and capture with my lens some sort of perspective, an idea of where it was we stood and the open air the flow before us. The colors of the day began to change and we headed down the slopes as the sun dipped. Rather tired we filled our water bottles and headed southwest to Dixie national forest, pulling up alongside a side road and setting our camp up in a small clearing as it began to half snow, half hail. With warm food in my belly I’m sitting in the car, writing the last of these words as I back up the thousands of photos I’ve snapped over the past week, wondering where the road will take us next. From here it is a straight shot west towards LA. Though there are marvels en route, they are marvels I’ve witnessed in the past as I leave the element of surprise and that feeling of beholding a awe inspiring site for the first time, behind on the peaks of Capitol reef. We drive west tomorrow and out of the dream like world that the Moab desert and this area of the four corners has brought to us, out of a dream and into the realities of californian living.
Tagged: Daniel Max Perez, National Parks, Nature, Photography, Southwest, Travel, Utah
We left the park and headed north then west and finally south, back into the world of canyonland as we rose up and up and further on up, on to the plateau they call the island in the sky. In all my travels, I have never seen anything that could compare to the scale of these lands as they dwarfed anything even my imagination could have conjured up. Like Zeus standing on top mount olympus with the world at his feet, I stood there on the edge of a sheer cliff that dropped over a thousand feet to its red rock footing below, which in turn dropped to the white flats, which then dropped again and again, down to the Colorado river.
The river flows invisible within the canyons depths towards its confluence with the green river. Like sitting on a cloud with a grandcanyon either side of you, the views stretched for perhaps a thousand miles in front, as shades of purple erupted from the canyon’s walls, punctuated by the red hues of the iron rich rock and soothed by the warm yellow clouds of the setting sun. This is a very special place on the planet, surely one of it’s most beautiful places, truly an island in the sky, a throne in the heavens as you behold the unending maze of the canyons, and their canyons and the canyons below them far far below. Feet dangling from the edge of the precipice of these telling rocks that reveal ages long since passed, frames the insignificance of your being to a T, but at the same time elevates you to levels unseen as the doors or perception are opened to your eyes. William Blake was indeed correct, on the edge of the grandest view the depths of your perception are indeed infinite looking out on this splendor of splendors, this heaven, or perhaps hell, on earth; stretched out so far below where you stand.
Delicate arches and the vastness of canyonlands left my mind contemplating the scale of what I had seen, leaving us drained and exhausted as we headed north to camp just outside the park on blm land. We chowed down our food and fell exhausted to our matts as the wind shook our tent and the temperature finally dropped. It didn’t matter, I had seen to the end of the world and fell asleep not worrying what life holds next.
Tagged: Daniel Max Perez, National Parks, Nature, Photography, Southwest, Travel, Utah
Summer is in full swing throughout the Moab desert as the last two days saw the arrival of scorching hot weather. My perceptions of scale have been challenged by the intricate designs of hundreds of lifetimes of erosion of two very different types. On the one hand there is the wind blown mounds turn into the awe inspiring arches and then equally or perhaps leaving even more of an impression is the eternal views from the top of Island in the Sky in canyonlands. It is impossible to perfectly describe in words the sites seen in the last four days. We rose early our first night near Moab, afraid of a potential fine having poached a walk in campsite, heading down the hills that surrounded this little oasis in the desert and creeping into town as dawn light rose above the moutains to the East. Jackie was hungry so we stopped for a quick dose of caffeine and a bite to eat in and old renovated building that had once acted as the town jailhouse.
Then we headed north, pulling up at cathedral rocks near the entrance of Arches national park and indulging in breakfast of nutella and bread as I marvelled at the towering natural citadels around us and the incredible cameras some Japanese tourists had brought to shoot photos of them. One particular woman had by estimates some 20 thousand dollars-ish hanging from her neck in 3 different cameras, far, far superior to bling in my opinion. We left behind the monoliths at the entrance and headed north to the edge of salt valley, formed over millions of years, as a salt upheaval had slowly washed away with the rain leaving a scarred, grey and red valley a couple miles wide.
The shattered landscape is only interrupted off in the distance by the broken backs of the tall red fins called the fiery furnace due to the color of the rocks at sunset. We crossed the valley, driving through the flame colored walls of the furnace to the devils garden, the largest concentration of arches in the park formed in a similar manner to the fiery furnace though younger in age and filled with pockets of green plants. The highlight was not the enormous, incredible spans of the arches, but climbing the backs of one of these beasts to reveal the expanse around. Like something out of a fairy-tale one could peer south towards the backdrop of the fiery furnace, silhouetted by 4 kilometre high snowy peaks, or east to the edge of the salt valley and an interminable desert, or north to the high sandstone cliffs of the desert like mountains ahead of us, or west over the verdant greens and reds of the devils gardens to the thornlike moab fault once heavily mined for it’s uranium deposits. It is no wonder the worlds first nuclear weapons came from this unimaginable place, as though the madness I saw before eyes, the energy of such a unique spot in the world could be harnessed into the brutal power of the worlds ultimate weapon.
We passed through the garden over the next couple hours, exploring the drops and slopes of the rocks. As we walked in an rather old lady joked to as that when she had started hiking she was our age, perhaps she had gone further than we had but it certainly took a while to see everything. We left exhausted, tired and seriously bronzed from the beat of the sun as we drove westwards along the colorado looking for a place, any place we could camp. After wasting an hour we settled on the idea of returning to our original site were I pitched our tent while jackie collapsed next to the trunk of our car to cook us another fantastic meal that fortunately accompany most of the stops we’ve made on this trip. Exhausted from our long day and early rise we crawled into bed and passed out into a long deep sleep.
Rising again the next day as dawn broke we headed back to the arches to hike the one section of park we had not seen and could not leave without seeing, to the mighty delicate arch. A long climb finishes on a ridge over a greyish rock hill, with the trace of red hues mixed into it’s composition. There at the top on the edge of plummeting water slides stands the arch in all it’s intrinsic glory, framing the white peaks off in the distance, a ton of rocks held carefully balanced on this ripple in the earths crust. Not content with that view we headed further up the hill, finally resting on the edge of a 300 foot cliff, peering over the edge as the wind ran over our backs to sweep around the lone arch. Magnificent indeed.
Tagged: Daniel Max Perez, National Parks, Nature, Photography, Southwest, Travel, Utah
After three nights on the beautiful BLM spot we had found near the needles in canyonland we packed up, as the sun rose high in the sky turning it’s fiery gaze in our direction and the temperatures shot up to 83 degrees, perhaps even more under its golden hot stare.
We took the morning slow, revelling in the still cool air as the sun warmed our bodies and I stretched. The beauty of the temperature in the Moab at this time of the year is that the air is still cool and crisp while the sun warms you quickly, leaving a fresh lick of color on your skin as you enjoy the occasional refreshing gust or breeze that leaves your body in a state of temperate bliss.
We drove the car East then North, through those same cliffs and chasms that had welcomed us with their red glow, the secrets of their beauty kept that way except by the words of mouth or the couple still images that escaped their midst but could never paint a true picture of their beauty. In what became a servicing day we washed our piles of dirty clothes at what seems to me the nicest laundromat I’ve ever seen, with free high speed wifi and cushy toilets; then went about filling our stomachs with nutrition, getting supplies and partaking in the obligatory ice cream in the desert. The sun had dropped in the sky by the time we pulled out of Moab, playing tricks with the long shadows of the houses that chased us Eastwards, upwards and out of town. As we rose up onto the sandflats above Moab, another mountain chain revealed itself fully in our windscreen, it’s white peaks the perfect contrast to the red sand in which we pitched our tent in a rush to watch the fall of the sun in the sky, the end of those magic couple hours of the day.
Climbing a nearby rock the sun faded in the horizon, painting the sky with the now familiar hues of the desert. I thought the day had ended but as we sat under the stars, ending our frugal diner consisting of the juicy, crunchy flesh of a jicama, I saw to my amazement a shooting star, only this star did not stop as it flew towards the horizon. Contrary to any intuition with which my eyes marvelled at the sight, the star began to grow larger… and larger! A meteorite! It flashed through our atmosphere in the split of a second leaving a trail of gas in its wake as it crashed into earth somewhere south of where we sat, probably reduced to the size of a pebble or less. A relaxed day indeed, but why rush when you don’t need to, when your surrounded by beauty and in touch with the pulse of nature, embracing those endless sights of the painted desert, sounds of the birds and unknowns in the night. the smell of the juniper bush above our tent, with it’s familiar sour, crispy pine fragrance or the now familiar clayey scent of broken, bashed sand dust below your feet. When you have water the desert is certainly a beautiful place.
Tagged: Daniel Max Perez, National Parks, Nature, Photography, Southwest, Travel, Utah
Yesterday was filled with rest and respite from the road as we decided to stay in our little spot and chill for the day. I started with what many of whom I’ve travelled with know I love to do most…. REPACK! The little car was getting messy so I repacked it all, planning to perfection the location of where everything was to go….perfecto. We gathered information and hiked for a couple miles along the top of one of the canyons. The contrast between the red, hot, sandstones of the surrounding desert as it is punctuated by mighty snow covered peaks looming to the north on the horizon, a world apart is a sight to behold. Up there on those same snow covered peaks was a world I had left behind, in the snowy peaks of the rockies and the bone cold nights that I will never forget, near mesa verde. How glorious it is to feel warm again as the summer seeps back into your life and the heat seeps deep below your skin. It was a lovely day of rest and perfect preparation for the following day of hiking.
Tagged: Daniel Max Perez, National Parks, Nature, Photography, Southwest, Travel, Utah
We drove up plateaus, across the painted deserts of Utah to the natural bridges national monument, where the rivers have carved what is almost horizontal monoliths, spanning dozens of metres, thousands of tons wide over timeless years. The combination of the dredge of the road with the emptiness of our stomach meant the bridges didn’t stir the excitement in our mind that it otherwise might have. I think we left with more memories of what we saw rather than the untamed feelings it should have provokes. We concluded that we needed a day off to digest everything we had seen before we set off on another real adventure lest the excitement were to be wasted on us. We drove north and took the first steps to remedy our blahzay mood, heading to an RV stop to shower, shave and wash our filthy bodies. What a liberating feeling to peel off the overpowering stench riden clothes I had been trapped in the last five days as every crevasse on my body was washed not once or twice but until my hands felt heavy and thoroughly pruned from the warm cool water that streamed down. One takes this for granted in modern living but in the wild a shower is the finest of luxuries, one a filth bucket like me would not take for granted.
I shaved, moisturized, relished in the warm water and finally left as we headed across town to the nearest super market and the promise of relief for our hungry bodies. We shopped, payed, packed stuff into the car and collapsed onto the floor of the parking lot as we stuffed ourselves and our desires with fresh salsa and over salted tortilla chips which left your lips stinging and parched but it really didn’t matter. With a new smile on our face and jerky in my belly we drove north then west across the desert, around some snow topped peaks and into a sunset that colored the enormous walls of the canyons we emerged into, we were in Canyonlands National Park. Canyonlands has a good reputation, I had heard of it when I lived in Colorado, but I wasn’t sure what to expect and surprised couldn’t describe how it made me feel. It is enormous, but unlike the enormity of Monument valley where we stood, the desert stretched out below us, this resembled more unscalable red rock walls, perched above us upon a green valley, layer upon layer, chasm after chasm, with the occasional lone needles sticking out of the ground, punctuated by a fire like sky. We asked some climbers for cheap or free camping spots and found a charming little spot near a creek on Bureau of land management land, which means another night without a dollar spent for the fifth night in a row. We munched down a huge salad looking forward to a day of rest to take in what we had seen such that we’d be ready for what would come next, with adventure on our mind. I wrote in my log sat alone on a sleeping matt relaxing with nothing but the noise of adjacent camps to disturb my company with the tiny spider that just crawled across my screen and the uncountable number of stars above me that shall continue to glisten long after I would fall asleep.
Tagged: Daniel Max Perez, National Parks, Nature, Photography, Southwest, Travel, Utah
I’ve left Vail and am currently in a national forest in the middle of absolute nowhere, called echo basin in southern Colorado. Near Mesa Verde National Park I find myself wearing four pairs of wool socks, 2 pairs of trousers, some long johns, some shorts, a tshirt, a wool sweater, two warm hoodies and scarf (will put on my other 2 pairs of gloves when I go to bed). Its cold at -5 Celsius as we prepare to bunk down and camp for the night.
First we headed south for around five hours, stopping in Leadville, the town that almost became the capitol of Colorado, before driving into the expanse of the San Juan valley alongside the Sangre de Cristo mountains and down to great sand dunes national park. The drive was spectacular as we passed the highest peaks in Colorado and then the San Juan valley, beautiful as the Sangre mountains just shoot out of the plain. The giant sand dunes (not Namibia giant but still 600 feet high) were much to our surprise covered in snow, and we were sort of worried about camping (it was below freezing in the night, horrifically cold for sure. Much to our surprise though, when we woke up the snow had either melted or been blown over with sand. We climb the second highest dune and were rewarded with spectacular vistas which was awesome. We then headed due west (in retrospect I would have headed south to Taos and Santa Fe but hindsight a bitch) and went to Mesa Verde, where we were surprised to find the park camping was still closed for winter, no worries though, Jackie is an accomplished car camper and taught me you can camp in the national forest for free so we drove a couple miles back and found a spot up a hill at the end of a dead end road, weird place for sure, though charming and beautiful. Last night was anything but though as our water bottles, our eggs, even our olive oil froze in the car and in our tent. Im glad I had decent gear (the aforementioned clothes plus my sleeping bag and a blanket) as it was chilly and to our surprise during the night 3 inches of snow had fallen!!! Today we woke up and headed to the park, marvelled at the beauty of the cliff dwellings took a tour and saw the beautiful canyons, its a beautful spot that makes me want to visit New Mexico. We’ve also eaten like kings as we brought all the spices we had from home and have come up with some lovely dishes with couscous, curries and oriental spices (last nights curry quinoai was amazing!) going to bed with full stomachs.
Tomorrow its an early rise then we drive southwest through the four corners to monument valley, then head north to Arches national park for more adventure! Tonight though is sure to be chilly, but we are prepared as always and shall be fine.
Tagged: Colorado, Great Sand Dunes, Roadtrip, Vail
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