So long, and thanks for all the fish

MARK LYNDERSAY

THIS IS the last BitDepth to appear in Newsday. It’s been a remarkable experience and one for which I remain grateful.

From December 2017 until, well, today, I’ve had an opportunity to shape and redefine the column and its relation to its audience to the benefit of both.

I got to work with BC Pires on Trini to the Bone for four years, ending the run of that feature with his death in October 2023.

Do I wish that I’d been able to do something more to shape the paper’s direction? Sure, but I am also mindful that its editorial management chose to keep me on during covid lockdowns, providing a real world lifeline when revenue streams began to dry up.

When those restrictions hit, I’d been planning to do a series of exclusive posts on technewstt.com, the website amplification of my technology coverage, so I donated them to the paper during those trying times instead.

At a meeting with then editor-in-chief Judy Raymond and Camille Moreno, I remember their visible relief as I went on about “feeding the golden goose,” in an extended and ham-handed metaphor. The streets outside the office that day were empty, an unsettling quiet embalming the city at midweek.

Both women were uncommonly and quietly supportive during my eight years and demonstrated admirable patience with my constant trickle of suggestions.

No idea I offered was a magic bean that would have helped Newsday to sprout to the skies again, and the hard reality is that a pivot to digital only would have sunk the paper almost immediately.

I can say this with some confidence because for 11 years I’ve been fighting to make TechNewsTT an independent revenue source. Very little has worked, resulting in very little from a financial perspective.

The limitations of a super-niche news website are balanced by the fact that I can, realistically, do nearly everything myself. Even so, unburdened by the boat anchor costs of a physical press and newsprint, online news struggles. Loop, underwritten by Digicel, folded abruptly when the company refocused on core business. Wired868 produces considered, authoritative sports reporting but enjoyed its greatest success with bacchanal laced with biting satire under the Mr LiveWire byline, an elegant reinvention of the Bomb’s Madame Petticoat.

A general news website operates at a dramatically larger scale and consumes human resources like a raging fire.

Since the announcement of the intent to wind up Newsday, there has been a flood of posts commenting on the paper’s failure and the apparent inability of its management to take advantage of its internet presence and audience.

Most of the commentary is fair and thoughtful. One in six of the 600 columns archived on TechNewsTT considered the challenges of modern journalism.

But, media momentum has its own power.

When Google bought YouTube in 2006 for US$1.65 billion, there was significant head-scratching in the broadcast industry. That year, the phenomenon of lonelygirl15, a series of video clips purporting to be an introspective diary of a teenage girl was unmasked as a staged production. Views of the videos increased.

Consider that. A documentary was revealed to be a fraud. On a new platform that nobody fully understood. All the rules had changed, but we wouldn’t realise that for years.

At its peak in 2008, MySpace had 300 million registered users, of which 115 million were described as active. Facebook was a contender, but it had a very different idea of what users meant to the business. Again the rules had changed. MySpace offered users a space to share their music and later, to build community. Facebook created an engine that turned users into fuel.

In 2005, Flickr was the bomb for photographers. An app that was crafted to surface photography in a way that made sense for the profession.

After Yahoo bought it in 2005, it clearly had no idea what to do with it. It slid slowly but inexorably into irrelevance, but it was a good idea and SmugMug bought it in 2018 to reinvent it for a new generation of photographers.

Reinventing local journalism would not be a simple matter and while the money was rolling in, there was little incentive to risk bold change.

Eighteen years ago I had a long talk with an executive at another media house about how they could strengthen their online presence.

I really wanted to make a change there, but the executive balked, because making the changes I was proposing might threaten a healthy advertising revenue.

“You build a new ship when the dock is active, not when it is burning,” I said.

That probably didn’t go over well, but long-term readers know I am prone to unlicensed comments.

Hindsight is always 20-20, but I’ve always been clear that the only way forward for journalism is immersion in the unfamiliar by both journalists and their managers. During my time at the paper, Newsday did try.

I note the tenure of Kalifa Clyne, who was a singular firebrand in shifting approaches to digital first at the paper. My reading of the column as an adjunct to the text dates back to her effort to introduce multimedia to the Newsday online.

Guarding revenue while establishing new inflows in constrained circumstances is difficult in ways I can’t imagine, though I experienced some of that at The Wire.

It’s probably a bit like trying to look at a video an excited child is trying to show you while you’re trying to enter a busy roundabout. All you can do is patiently explain to the enthusiastic youth why you just can’t do that.

Even with the best of intentions, it isn’t always possible to avoid a crash that brings everything to a halt.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there