No, what is needed is a revision of what constitutes motivation and purpose in life. That can be done if you have free education, a guaranteed income and a society that values accomplishment beyond the simple accrual of monetary gain. Note that America classical culture and art has been taken over by the products of the old Soviet System. They had great education, guaranteed income, lots of practice and a value placed on competence rather than monetary status. Americans with our base of simple self-interest, as monetary gain, could not keep up with the virtuosic requirements contained in the classical arts. An artistic career in America was more akin to making a living in a casino than to genuine work. The more highly trained and experienced musicians of the Soviet Union mopped up the American stage with our homegrown products once the Iron Curtain came down. Where is Renee Fleming? Why is Netrebko the house Prima Donna at the Metropolitan? And that's just the start. From there you go to the Media, Healthcare, Science, Education, Philosophy and Sports. How many of the American winners are related to the Soviet training system? How many of the computer experts in America are products of the that same Soviet training system?
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Arthur Cordell Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 4:17 PM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'; 'Keith Hudson' Subject: Re: [Futurework] FW: Wondering How Far Magazines Must Fall - NYTimes.com REH What is required is a whole new way of thinking. Arthur: What is needed is a new pricing and taxing structure for the digital economy. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 12:46 PM To: 'Keith Hudson'; 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] FW: Wondering How Far Magazines Must Fall - NYTimes.com Well said Keith. This may very well be the end of capitalism since intellectual property is essentially free. But if its free, how will the workers make a living within it? The problem is that it's complicated to learn to do and to produce. It can't be done as an avocation. There are all kinds of possibilities. The worst is the entertainment possibility that was put in place for commercial music and television sit-coms and sports. It killed the classical arts reducing their performance by 98% from the 1929 crash and the advent of film, recordings and free TV. Now it is killing the dailies who are becoming more and more irrelevant and going the way of live performances. How can a product be paid for and how can it be considered of value when its not valuable enough to generate a price but wickedly hard to do. What is required is a whole new way of thinking. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 6:03 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] FW: Wondering How Far Magazines Must Fall - NYTimes.com The main clue to the problem that Arthur draws our attention to is revealed in the last sentence of the last paragraph of the NYT article: <<<< Ultimately, it doesnt matter what you put on the cover of your magazine if no one will look at you. A few weeks ago, I was in a busy doctors office with a dozen others, absently paging through the magazines on the table. The table in front of us was stacked with the pride of American publishing, all manner of topics and fancy covers yelling for attention. Ever the intrepid media reporter, I looked up from scanning Bon Appétit to see what other people were interested in. A mother and a daughter were locked in conversation, but everyone else was busy reading - their phones. >>>> The migration of newspapers and news magazines onto the Internet is a trend that owners, editors and journalists have been fully aware of for a long time. But they're not taking much notice of an even more important trend, or in denial about the full significance of it. This is obscured in the writer's (David Carr) third sentence above. The typical table in a doctor's or dentist's waiting room would not contain magazines covering "all manner of topics", only a very small selection of them. There has been such an explosion in glossy hobby and specialist magazines in the last 30 years that the table would need to be 20 or 30 times the size. In nearby Bath, the central newsagent's shop contains a magazine rack several ranks deep that goes on forever -- and then doubles back in another parallel row! The loss of sales of newspapers and news magazines is perilous in the extreme. As viable propositions in their present form, they cannot have more than a year or two ahead of them now. I can understand why owners, editors and journalists are so apprehensive. The solution is obvious, even though it will inevitably wrench the whole news industry into pieces during the process of adaptation. This is that the newspaper or news magazine must divide into several more specialized issues -- at least a dozen I would suggest. And all on the Internet. Thus The Times could become Times Financial, Times Society, Times Obituaries, Times Politics, Times International, Times Sports, Times Cars, Times Home Interiors, Times Fashions, Times Health, Times Holidays, and so on. Some would be daily, others weekly, monthly or even quarterly. Being specialized, they could then carry short adverts of precise products that are directly relevant to the content -- of the sort that Google has so far largely monopolized. Website newspapers and magazines would then have a chance of paying for themselves and not having to consider the silly subscription experiments which some are now trying. The Financial Times (which itself ought to be published in at least three different issues) is one of the silliest experiments at the present time. Pearsons still hasn't grasped that the essential nature of the Internet is totally different from print. Until three years ago when I moved house, I used to have the FT delivered to my home (along with another quality newspaper bought mainly for its crossword) but I only read a quarter of it, if that. I now go to its website and read the headlines of what it considers to be the dozen or so of the more important stories of the day. It helps me to get my bearings. I don't subscribe because I will come across several more free accounts on the Internet. What Pearsons, Murdoch and other media owners don't realize is that putting a price on their stories doesn't necessarily make them accurate. They could get away with implying this when they had the monopoly of printing or broadcasting. They've got to realize that the nature of the Internet means that unless their products are free then they'll have even less readership. If they want to sell extended or more detailed versions of the news items then they can be advertised separately along with other products. In the case of the FT what makes the present policy even more absurd is that the website's most interesting features -- the interview videos -- are still free! I think Pearsons must realize intuitively that if they charged fees for these then they'd be cutting their last links with people like me. I wouldn't bother to go to its website at all. Keith At 02:42 14/08/2012, Arthur wrote: Making a weekly newsmagazine has always been a tough racket. It takes a big staff working on punishing deadlines to aggregate the flurry of news, put some learned topspin on it and package it for readers. But that job now belongs to the Web and takes place in real time, not a week later. ..... Like newspapers, magazines have been in a steady slide, but now, like newspapers, they seem to have reached the edge of the cliff. Last week, the Audit Bureau of Circulationsreported that newsstand circulation in the first half of the year was down almost 10 percent. When 10 percent of your retail buyers depart over the course of a year, something fundamental is at work. ...... Historically, certain categories of magazine will encounter turbulence, but this time all categories were punished in the pileup. People was down 18.6 percent, and The New Yorker had a similar drop, declining by 17.4 percent. Vogue and Cosmopolitan were down in the midteens, and Time fell 31 percent. When Cat Fancy is down 23 percent at the newsstand, it seems that there's little place to hide. Newsweek, it should be mentioned, was off only 9.7 percent at the newsstand, but that's cold comfort. More... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/business/media/wondering-how-far-magazines -must-fall.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120813 http://tinyurl.com/8o9ersr Sent from my iPad _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com <http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/>
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