Month: January 2014

How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood ⇥ theatlantic.com

Alexis Madrigal, the Atlantic:

After I filled him in on what we’d done, I waited to hear his reaction, wondering if I was about to have my Netflix account permanently canceled. Instead, he said, “And now you want to come in and talk to Todd Yellin, I guess?”

Yellin is Netflix’s VP of Product and the man responsible for the creation of Netflix’s system. Tagging all the movies was his idea. How to tag them began with a 24-page document he wrote himself. He tagged the early movies and guided the creation of all the systems.

Yes, of course I wanted to meet Yellin. He had become my Wizard of Oz, the man who made the machine, the human whose intelligence and sensibility I’d been tracking through the data.

At our interview, Yellin turned to me and said, “I’ve been waiting for someone to bubble up like this for years.”

No mention of whether Yellin was stroking a cat on his knee.

Madrigal went real deep into Netflix’s specific genre tagging hierarchy, though. It’s incredible how much time they’ve spent to get those genres; then again, it’s a tiny investment to create recommendations which approach an ideal.

Re/code ⇥ recode.net

Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg have launched their new venture, which they’ve dubbed “Re/code” (yep, with the slash — apparently they took branding lessons from Yahoo):

While we are presenting an improved new face, we promise that, if you liked what we were doing at All Things Digital and the D conferences, you will love what we are now planning for Re/code. We pledge to bring the same energy and standards to our news, reviews and events, with the plus of adding in even more talented staff and resources to the mix.

We hold the controlling interest in Revere. But we are tremendously proud and excited to have the help of the NBCUniversal News Group and Windsor as investors in our endeavor. In addition to funding our new venture, they will be strategic partners in the true sense of the word.

They brought over their AllThingsD team for both the website and the conference, which has been renamed “Code Conference”. Sounds like a very promising reboot from some of the best in the business.

The Year We Broke the Internet ⇥ esquire.com

Luke O’Neil, writing for Esquire:

Everyone wants everything for free now—news, music, movies, etc.—which means the companies don’t have any money to pay people to produce original work. None of this is anything you haven’t heard before, but it bears repeating. In order to make a living, those of us who had the bad sense to shackle ourselves to a career in media before that world ended have to churn out more content faster than ever to make up for the drastically reduced pay scale. We’re left with the choice of spending a week reporting a story we’re actually proud of (as I do just frequently enough to ensure a somewhat restful sleep every other night), reaping a grand sum of somewhere in the ballpark of two hundred to five hundred dollars if we’re lucky, or we can grind out ten blog posts at twenty-five to fifty bucks a pop that take fifteen minutes each. That means the work across the board ends up being significantly more disposable, which in turn makes the readers value it less, which means they want to pay less for it, and so on. It’s an ouroboros of shit.

I think there’s something of a flimsy excuse in here, but that doesn’t make it untrue. Decent reporting was hard, often thankless work even in the pre-internet days. In some ways, it has gotten better — stories which matter are circulated and read more widely than they would have been if they were only available in printed form.

But this hasn’t come without a high price. While it has never been cheap to produce an investigative report, the conflation of reduced advertising revenue, higher investigative costs, and a world in which we need good reporting more than ever has produced a climate antithetical to great reporting.

Then again, it’s worth remembering that the internet didn’t necessarily kill newspapers. However, it has accelerated the decline.

In somewhat related news, I received an email from ProPublica the other day seeking donations. If you like investigative reporting that matters, you should probably donate. ProPublica does great work.

What Could Have Entered the Public Domain Today? ⇥ web.law.duke.edu

Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain:

Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years – an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1957 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2014, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2053. And no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. The laws in Canada and the EU are different – thousands of works are entering their public domains on January 1.