Seminal Work Or Sloppy Thinking?

http://editor.blogspot.com/2009/09/seminal-work-or-sloppy-thinking.html

by ojbyrne • 17 years ago

35 40 17 years ago

editor.blogspot.com

TomOfTTB2• 17 years ago

I'm glad someone said this. I, like I'm sure a lot of people here, have a tremendous amount of respect for Paul Graham. So I really couldn't bring myself to write a formal critique of this piece. But it's just a complete mis-fire and this article (along with the one linked to in the update) go a long way to showing why.

Anyway, thoughts should be up for critique no matter how respected the person is who offers them so I'm glad someone jumped to the critique when others (myself included) didn't.

lionhearted• 17 years ago

I'm not entirely sold on Graham's original point nor the author's rebuttal, but the piece has got a couple pretty big hypocrisies. For instance, both from the piece:

> Calling the NYT "a printout of yesterday's news" is snotty and snarky, to be sure, but it's also inaccurate.

> Graham needs some elementary economics and business instruction.

Like, calling out a multimillionaire technological innovator/investor on being "snotty and snarky", then quipping (snottily and snarkily) that he needs "elementary economics and business instruction" - okay... pot, meet kettle, blackness.

omouse• 17 years ago

okay... pot, meet kettle, blackness.

That's irrelevant. Graham could still need economics and business instruction even if the writer here was being snarky.

ggrot• 17 years ago

I really appreciate how the article ends by saying that the author agrees with Paul's main conclusions, but that the author disagrees with the arguments being made. That's largely how I felt after reading Paul's essay too, but I couldn't have articulated it as well.

madair• 17 years ago

1. Saying "actually cheaper" is not the point of the remark, it's just a secondary remark about the specific comparison case, the point is that populist and relatively crappy journalism has a comparable cost to to the consumer as high quality journalism.

2. Everyone knows that big book deals are edge cases. Why is he arguing the outliers.

3. He's answering the flowery anecdotal part of the essay as if it's a serious evidential point? I presume he doesn't ever use anecdotes in his writing? I hope not because all anecdotes by definition can be denied (i.e. what is truth? i.e. incompleteness theorem)

4. He valiantly tries to defend his position to a commentator on his blog who points out that this is about cost to the consumer and eventual failure of a model that treats the content like print on a fabric. He's pointing out the very same thing that PG is pointing out, that this is their strategic plan, and that is doomed. This is the part where the author's retort to PG's piece really crashes and burns.

Legion• 17 years ago

If the New York Times is a "printout of yesterday's news", does that make The Economist a "printout of last week's news"?

glymor• 17 years ago

No, at it's best it makes it an analysis of last weeks news.

philwelch2• 17 years ago

Howard: Graham's insult is correct only if he thinks only generic facts and events are "news." That's a small fraction of what the New York Times presents every day.

Reality: All of the "analysis", opinion, reviews, and other content is also fairly easily replaced with free alternatives available online.

Howard: Famous, popular authors make LOTS more money than others. Laura Bush got $1.7; by some reports Sarah Palin got $7 million. Graham's contention is just plainly wrong.

Reality: Graham's contention was not that all authors make equal amounts of money, but rather that all books are priced the same, based upon form rather than content. Go to a bookstore. Similarly bound and printed books cost similarly regardless of differences in content.

Howard: The decision to price all movies or CDs about the same is a marketing decision that says absolutely nothing about the relative value of the content.

Reality: The market value of a product is its price.

timr• 17 years ago

"Reality: All of the "analysis", opinion, reviews, and other content is also fairly easily replaced with free alternatives available online."

That's not "reality", that's just your opinion.

I have a subscription to the New York Times, and I can tell you that I read more -- and more diversely -- when I get it in printed format. So, yes, there's a "free" alternative to getting it delivered to my doorstep, but I find enough value in having the paper version that I'm willing pay for it.

And in any case, the author's point was to dispute the notion that a copy of the New York Times is worthless after a day, not to suggest that you couldn't obtain the content online.

philwelch2• 17 years ago

I was mocking the author's format--your immediate reaction would be better addressed to him.

pg4• 17 years ago

Man, these journalists are so nice compared to the Internet trolls I'm used to. I barely feel goaded into responding. But...

- Do Time and The Economist actually switch lengths? It's true I only looked at one week, but I found a clear trend of constant cost per weight of paper used, not just between those two but also for heavier mags like Foreign Policy.

- Laura Bush makes more by (and only by) selling more copies, just like a popular fabric pattern.

- What I meant about the "printout of yesterday's news" was not that events they covered happened the day before, but that it was literally a printout of stories that had appeared the day before on the Times's web site.

- His last point seems a repetition of the one about Laura Bush, but with more uppercase.

psyklic• 17 years ago

I found the original article insightful, but this journalist's rebuttals also bring up interesting points.

- "Does content affect price?" It seems the journalist and PG define "price" differently -- is it the price to the consumer or to the publisher? Either way affects profit, so both seem valid to me.

Hence, I feel the journalist has a valid point. Laura Bush will command higher royalties. So, the price to the publisher is increased (via higher royalties/advances), because Laura Bush provides desirable content. The journalist also states that while the price to the consumer is not higher, the publishers' business model is to sell more copies at a lower profit margin per copy, which seems perfectly valid.

- "Better journalism is slightly cheaper." In some cases, yes. In others, no. Arguing over Time vs. The Economist seems to not answer the broader question.

whopa2• 17 years ago

> Hence, I feel the journalist has a valid point. Laura Bush will command higher royalties. So, the price to the publisher is increased (via higher royalties/advances), because Laura Bush provides desirable content.

Is it really true that different authors can have wildly different royalty rates? I thought the range only spanned a few percentage points.

Advances don't really count, since they are paid out of future royalties.

alextp• 17 years ago

Well, one could measure Newsweek (5.95) versus New Yorker (4.99), and I think that if you ignore tabloids and very glossy magazines most news have the same price.

jsz0• 17 years ago

"but that it was literally a printout of stories that had appeared the day before on the Times's web site."

Not really true. NYT posts the bulk of their front page material online early in the morning. Usually 3-4AM Eastern. This usually includes editorials as well. I assume it goes live online when the articles are finalized for print. This isn't set in stone of course. So someone sleeping a normal schedule getting their paper at 7 or 8AM is seeing mostly fresh content.

frig4• 17 years ago

You are being pretty sloppy.

If you go to an actual bookstore (or library) and look at newsstand prices for, eg, Canteen or Dwell or Parabola or Foreign Affairs or New Left Review or Ampersand or 34th Parallel (or god forbid Science + Nature) and so on you'd have a harder time arriving at such a neat relationship.

Now, if you grouped by "content niche" and analyzed each niche separately you might find in some niches (like "news", specifically) a clean relationship like what you proposed.

pg4• 17 years ago

Not really. My claim in the essay was that prices didn't depend on the quality of the content. All I needed to support that were a few counterexamples to anyone claiming they did. Though I did see evidence of a trend toward magazines being priced according to paper content, that would have been more than a I needed.

howardweaver• 17 years ago

Paul -- I don't mean to be trollish at all. I think of what I did as more a "debugging" exercise :)

* Yes, Time and The Economist have varied and sometimes opposite volumes. Your point just isn't meaningful.

* This re-rebuttal doesn't address your original point, which wasn't so much about patterns vs books as it was your contention that content is all treated the same. Laura Bush hasn't sold any books yet, but she has the money.

* I'm glad you didn't mean what you said. But you did say it.

* I really ought to avoid uppercase, you're right. But it's not the same point. The first is about inputs, the last about marketing and selling strategies. Quite different.

best,

Howard Weaver editor.blogspot.com

pg4• 17 years ago

I'm glad you didn't mean what you said. But you did say it.

That's more like it. You'll pick up trolling in no time.

Retric• 17 years ago

Please read: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=832987 to get a clue.

Further, publishers have no real advantage over each other. Once you print 100,000 copies the cost per page does not change. Book publishers and Music companies have the exact same business model. They all rely on constant prices, and a few wild successes to make their money. They don't really know how to pick winners so they front a little money as a gamble just like VC's and hope the got a winner to two. The big name authors can get the publishers to fight each other so you end up with a fairly stable equilibrium across the industry.

PS: There are lot's of special cases, and even if profit is zero, keeping the presses rolling has value etc. But, that's less important than you might think.

comradity3• 17 years ago

Dear Paul Graham,

We can argue about whose got better content all night long.

However,the value of the content to the consumer is worth more than the words themselves. How does the content improve their lives - look smarter at a cocktail party, transform an otherwise mind-numbing train ride, decide what stock to buy, pick up a girl at a bar, break the ice at the beginning of a cold call with a sales prospect. What is all that worth?

Have publishers charged enough? Has publisher marketing take advantage of this added value to generate more subscriptions? How much more value can be added with the interactivity and immediacy of new technologies and how publishers harvest and use this information to convince consumers to pay more.

By the way, I wonder how many people told Steve Jobs that no one would pay for I-Tunes? I'd bet it was many.

Katherine Warman Kern @comradity

netsp4• 17 years ago

comradity,

I think you are missing the point. The essay doesn't discuss the value of this content but it's price. These are not the same. Price is somehere between the maximum the buyer is willing to pay, considering his other options & the minimum the seller is willing to sell at, considering his opportunity cost.

In a competitive market, the price usually creeps close to the latter because consumers have more and better options to consider. In a monopolistic one, it creeps closer to the latter for the opposite reason.

The reason the price of content might be zero in the content industry is that A) The opportunity cost for the seller is 0 & B) The market is more competitive.

leif• 17 years ago

I skimmed more and read less of the original article as I went along, but from what I got, it just seems like he's trying too hard to make a clean, academic argument regarding the publishing industry. It's been around so long that it's full of exceptions, caveats, inefficiencies, and idiosyncrasies, not to mention the countless people wrapped up in it financially and psychologically, and this, I think, makes it too difficult to reason about as generally as he tries.

My biggest beef, though, comes when he claims that publishers don't sell content. Of course they do, and if they didn't, why did he even bring up the price difference between Time and The Economist (is one printed on shinier paper? Probably, but that's not why anyone buys The Economist). Some of the price is obviously determined by the medium, too (just as in music sales), and of course countless other factors, and there's no reason to try to narrow it down to just one. When the method of conveyance disappears, everything will shift around a bit and make everyone uncomfortable (like it's doing now), but eventually settle down not far from where it started. These systems aren't static sets of rules being followed blindly by their executives, they'll adapt to fit their market.

This whole thing seems weird. When did Paul get this faultily academic?

buro9• 17 years ago

They're both right, they're both wrong.

It hurts so much to see a sloppy reprisal too, which is why I must now attempt to make a sloppy one too.

In my mind this is the bit we need to be conscious of: Content has value, but the distribution method sets the price.

And that is why both slightly miss the point in my mind.

If we look at music (because it's a simple model with many distribution methods which helps create clear comparisons) we have this:

* A ring tone: £4.50 (ringtones-direct.com), midi file of 10 seconds.

* A CD album: £16.49 (HMV), average 10 tracks, £1.65 per track, full CD quality.

* A CD single: £1.99 (Tesco, if you can find singles), average 2 tracks, £1 per track, full CD quality.

* iTunes: £0.79 per track (lossy).

* MP3 .torrent: £0.00 per track (lossy).

* FLAC .torrent: £0.00 per track, full CD quality.

The content has value in all formats, but the highest price is associated to the format in which the distribution is most directly controlled (phones, ring tones, and the DRM scheme on some phones which force the use of a DRM signed audio file), amusingly it's also the lowest quality representation of the content.

As the control over the distribution fades the price plummets until we reach bittorrents and the people doing the distribution where the price is zero, although clearly value is still there as it wouldn't be downloaded otherwise.

What neither argument made was the distinction that the price is set by the format and distribution and not by the content. The content has value, that is undeniable, but value != price and that is what so many find hard to resolve.

The NYT is widely distributed and tends to have a lower price than the Economist, which is still widely distributed but less so and has a higher price. Specialist journals distributed as part of memberships to societys have a very high price.

When I look at price, it's not the # of words that determines the price, it's nearly always the format and distribution method. The more control that can be exerted by the content owners, the higher they are able to set the price.

Disclaimer: I always write these things feeling agog at what I've read... I have not researched things specifically and have not published any papers to back up these assertions. Take them with a pinch of meh.

mr_luc• 17 years ago

( The following three paragraphs should be read aloud in the voice of Foghorn Leghorn).

I'm no fancy big-city journalist, just a simple country kill-floor worker in a JBS Swift slaughter house. I've developed a tolerance for organic discord.

Yet I'm annoyed by the messy thinking that dribbles helplessly throughout this supposed rebuttal.

More than that, I'm irritated by the obvious purpose behind a loud 'rebuttal' of obviously poor quality that finishes by saying I agree and I thought it first.

It was written because the author felt compelled to write something that he and others could point to as a "rebuttal," a response. It doesn't matter if the rebuttal is good or bad, true or untrue (bad and untrue, as it happens); what matters is, now it's "been rebutted."

Let me grab my skinning knife. Unpronounceable Journalism Wunderkind, let's you and me sit down and talk:

Graham's contention is that there aren't magazines that routinely cost significantly more per page than the average for their format. If that is false, then you've rebutted him. It's not sufficient to note that the length of those magazines shows some variation.

Empirically, it seems that Graham's premise is sound. Magazines all seem to have similar price per page. The next place where you can rebut him is by answering the question: Why? It's either because the content of all magazines is equally valuable, or because the content is irrelevant to the price of the magazine. Does the price vary, at least, with the format? Well, of course. Large, glossy magazines cost more per page. But not more than other large, glossy magazines.

Not rebutted - and no attempt was made.

Graham says that publishers get rich by selling lots of books, not by charging more for better or more popular books. You say, "nuh-uh, Sarah Palin made lots of money."

Uh. I'm not sure your training in journalism has equipped you to realize it, but that's not a rebuttal. That's not anything.

Not rebutted - no attempt was made.

'The NYT in paper is yesterday's news.' Why, how dare he! Well, I never! It's 'snotty and snarky.' Ah, and it's "inaccurate." Because -- and this, see, is where you give your reason and perform your debunking and unbunking and generally get the bunk out -- because you're pretty sure that there's stuff in there someone hasn't read yet. Never mind that the NYT itself published those stories online.

Yesterday.

Finally, the question. "Why has the price mostly depended on the format, not the content? Why didn't better content cost more?" (Italics mine). You say, loudly, that better content is more profitable -- because of volume.

Then you have the nerve to conclude by saying that you had all of the ideas that Graham had, and you just have no respect for his sloppy thinking and reasoning.

You didn't refute, or even address, a single point made in the essay. The "sloppy thinking and errors" were entirely your own. But now, you've "addressed" it. Back-pats all around, face has been saved, as long as we overlook the fact that your piece is drivel.

( Perhaps I'm wrong here. I often am. Certainly, you have domain knowledge that could have contributed greatly to this discussion; I'd read any substantive contributions with pleasure. )

chuck_taylor• 17 years ago

Both principals' original and rebutting words are at once smart and sloppy. This speaks to the complexity of discussing the economics of knowledge and taste.

For example, neither writer seems to have tackled the role of advertising revenue and other intangibles in assessing the value of content.

There are comparatively few ads in an edition of The Economist, which might explain why a subscription is so much greater than that of Time. And that should be factored into any newsstand-price-per-page analysis.

And some weekly trade publications, delivered by mail at no small cost, are monetarily free to the readers because subscribers pay with other currency -- information about themselves, their companies, and their spending plans.

I would also point out that the popularity of a fabric pattern or the life story of Sarah Palin are related more to taste and fad than to the value of any elusive wisdom, such as that derived from The New York Times or The Economist.

Mr. Graham is correct in noting a demarcation between conveyance and content, but as Mr. Weaver points out, it's not all that simple to proceed from there.

In any event, I've really enjoyed reading both sides of this, and I am impressed by the overall quality of the comments.

Seminal Work Or Sloppy Thinking?

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