You Want to Support An “Indie” Artist? Here’s Your Chance

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The internet is full of chatter about supporting independent entrepreneurs. About “buying local.” About supporting self-published writers and indie films that flout Hollywood. About supporting open-source software.

You get my drift.

Time to put your money where your mouth is. I’ve mentioned Beer Wars here several times -- and to repeat the full disclosure: yes, I’m in the film. Yes, I’m friends with Anat Baron, who financed, produced, and directed the film.

But even if that were not the case, I’d still say: Support this film. Buy a ticket. See it on April 16.

Why? Because this documentary is the work of an independent film maker. There are no big names, and definitely no Big Bucks, involved. This film came straight out of Anat’s desire to tell a specific story.

No, not a story about Big Beer versus Pure Beer, as many people seem to think. Rather, she wanted to explore a larger, more universal matter: the nature of personal vision, ambition, and entrepreneurship.

Because Beer Wars isn’t about beer. She only used “beer” as a lens through which to document what happens when ordinary people pursue their dreams. As a result, it’s a film about both success and failure. (This is not a totally-happy-ending film.)

I’ve heard lots of chatter in the beer blogosphere from people who don’t want to see the movie. They object to Ben Stein as moderator of the live panel discussion that will follow the film. Fine. Leave when the film ends.

Some say they won’t bother to see it because the story of  Big Brewers versus Small Brewers is Old News. To which I say: it’s only “old news” if you’re ensconced in the beer world. But most Americans are not part of the beer world.

Finally, the beer-geek critics complain that the world keeps ignoring Craft Beer. They’re frustrated that 97% of Americans still drink Big Beer rather than local craft beer. But when someone tries to tell a story centered on craft beer, well, see the critiques above. Ain’t no pleasin’ some people.

But I hope you'll see the film for another, more personal reason. I'm a writer, and I know how hard it is to create something from nothing. To have an idea and pursue it from vision to printed page. Making movies, I've learned, is exactly like writing books: It requires self-discipline and dedication. It requires thousands of hours of work, oceans of blood, sweat, tears, and an infinite capacity for frustration, depression, and despair.

In short, making movies, like writing books, brewing beer, editing Wikipedia, or creating open-source softeware, demands personal passion.

It's hard for me to find words to express how much I admire Anat for her devotion to this project. She's spent three years of her life, and a whole lotta money, pursuing her vision, creating something from nothing.

So I hope you'll support an indie artist and her work. Beer Wars. April 16. In a theater near you. (And if it’s not in a theater near you, don’t blame Anat. The event will be beamed via satellite, and not every American movie theater is “wired” for satellite.)

Historians and the Preservation of Newspaper Content, Part 3

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Part 1 --- Part 2 --- Part 3 --- Part 4

Okay, so we know that owners of newspapers typically preserve copies of the printed edition. But what about the electronic editions of defunct newspapers?

Consider the Rocky Mountain News, which went under a couple of weeks ago. I’m certain that the printed editions of that newspaper were preserved, either by filming, scanning, or digitization. As of this moment, the site is still online. It’s not being updated, of course -- it’s essentially frozen at the moment of that last issue -- but you can still search its old contents. (And it has a fee-based archive that goes back to the 1980s.)

But -- who or what will maintain that site? For that matter, who will own and administer access to that electronic archive?

Websites are like empty houses:  Someone needs to show up once in awhile to make sure the roof’s not leaking and no one’s broken in. Same with abandoned websites. Someone needs to maintain it -- or not. If the site is abandoned, eventually all of its contents will disappear. That's the same as hauling the newspaper's paper documents to the city dump.

Frankly, the thought of these sites vanishing is, well, an unhappy one. If the New York Times goes under (god forbid; it's a planetary treasure), will some deep-pocketed person or organization agree to administer the online site?

But the growing number of defunct newspapers also poses another, paper-related matter, namely, what will become of the paper trail generated in the process of publishing a daily newspaper? For example, the staff of the Rocky Mountain News generated photographs (not all of which landed on the website or in the printed edition); drafts of stories; reporters' notes; telephone records; management memos; and other paper-based documents.

In theory, that material will be boxed for storage, and the entity that owns the company itself will look for a repository for this material. A logical choice is the Colorado State Historical Society, or perhaps Special Collections at the University of Colorado or some other university, or the Denver Public Library.

The catch here is money: Anyone can donate material to a historical society or library. You can donate your shopping lists, kids' drawings, family photos, and anything else your heart desires to save. But unless you also donate some some cash, it can be difficult for the recipient to do much with the material except store it in a warehouse.

That's because the task of sorting through and cataloging that paper-based material requires the services of professional archivists. Like everyone else, archivists don’t work for free, so until and unless an institution can afford to sort, process, and catalog a paper collection, it will sit in boxes. (I hasten to add boxes of archival material are stored in buildings with high-tech controls for humidity and temperature.)

So the short answer to the question that launched this series is that newspapers have been saving their contents, but the future of the paper version of a newspaper is more certain than the future of its online version. Which is completely counterintuitive, but hey, this the Age of E-Quarius. Who knows what will happen?

NEXT: How a historian's research is affected by what is, and is not, saved.

Consumer Perception, Beer, Prices, and Homebrewing

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Okay, the following will likely only appeal to those who are interested in 1) beer; 2) economics; 3) the current economic crisis; 4) homebrewing as a response to said crisis; and 5) Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory.

Trust me on this, it's all here and all connected. And yes, this will be a bit complicated and require some patience to wade through. (Will it be worth it? I have no idea.)

Anyway . . . First: I understand that craft brewers -- all brewers, in fact --- are in business to make money. They also manufacture an agricultural-based product, so to a large extent their prices for raw materials are dependent on drought, excess rain, hard winters, and so forth. They also have to pay for fuel, insurance, blah blah blah. AND they want to make a profit.

But I suspect that many consumers of craft beer are starting to wonder if craft brewers are taking said consumers for granted, as in: "Oh, they only drink craft beer. They'll buy at any price." If so, they could be in trouble.

Again, I'm not saying that's what craft brewers are doing so. I'm saying that this is the perception among some consumers of craft beer. And perceptions are powerful things.

So that's the general background. The specific background is that some weeks back, I posted a blog entry about beer prices. You can read that here. I followed that up with blog entry on a follow-up from Patrick Emerson on the economics of homebrewing.

No surprise, the subject of beer prices came up again recently at the blogs of Jeff Alworth and Stan Hieronymus. And all of this prompted a full-tilt rant from Dexter, my Loyal Reader From Hawaii. I now turn this blog entry over to him so you can read the rant in its entirety because it's worth reading (and because he's a hugely entertaining writer).

There is a punchline of sorts at the end.

I can home brew so [rising beer prices don't] affect me so much. Although... when Samuel Adams switched to "Variable Pricing" on their Double Bock it certainly got my BVDs in a bunch. Last year SA sold its Double Bock seasonally in six packs at around $33.50/case.

I bought 5 cases in March and stored it a cool, dark unlighted place. Figured it would last me until March Ought Nine when I could stock my next year's supply. [In Hawaii buying good beer is like shopping at Costco. If I see something unusual at Tamura's Fine Wine & Liquors in Kaimuki, I have to buy as much as I can afford that day because there is no guarantee that it will be there when I come back.]

Anyway come January this year I read a press release saying that SA is yanking their Double Bock out of seasonal rotation putting it in some fancy printed cardboard 4 pack to increase its "perceived value" and jacking that value to $9.95/4 pack. So this smooth marketing move was hiking the price of Double Bock to $60/case!

As Peter Cooke says in 'Good Evening'(1977) "Well, I wrote a letter!" - more like screamed at their customer relations department, "What the fuck are you doing raising the price of SA Double Bock over 50%i n one year?!" And Mr. Todd Bellamy wrote back saying that SA Double was being added to their new "Imperial Series" [just oozes "perceived value"] and that

Samuel Adams Double Bock is expensive to brew. It is brewed with a ½ pound per malted barley per bottle—three to four times the normal amount. Barley prices have increased significantly in the last year.  When it was brewed seasonally and we sold it 6-packs we elected to keep the price consistent with other Samuel Adams styles in order to maintain continuity and avoid confusion despite it’s significantly higher cost.  Now that we are introducing Samuel Adams Double Bock on a year-round basis we need to price it at a point that more accurately reflects the cost of the ingredients to brew this extraordinary, rich lager

It wasn't until the beginning of March when I tasted some of the Ought Nine Imperial Series Double Bock that I came to the realization that this was Bullshit.

Now I don't doubt that in years past that they did use more barley. You could taste it, it had a ton of malt flavor. SA would advertise that its DB was "Award Winning" and "World Class", and they were right! Ron would bring in German DBs from Philly and the SA Double Bock could hold its own Head to Head.

But what I tasted this year wasn't "Award Winning" - it was watered down - it was a New Coke double bock clone. They had gone and changed the recipe!!! http://www.pintlog.com/2009/02/samuel-adams-to-release-new-imperial.html

AARGGH! Why would you go and change a recipe that had won you numerous awards in national competition?? You would change it because some bean counters told you that when you geared up for annual production you now had to adjust your ingredients to hit a price point.

There may be some extra malt in their DB mash, but I can't tell because it's not coming out in a great flavor like last year's DB had. I wrote back to SA and told them that their "New Coke double bock clone" wouldn't even place in the SA Long Shot Home Brew Contest.

More indications that this is marketing bullshit. Around the beginning of Philly Beer Week Don Russell [Joe Sixpack] did a little piece on Good Tasting Beers for Good Value. The last beer he featured was Spaten Optimator which he says is available in Philadelphia in six packs for the same price as I paid for SA Double Bock last year!!!

How can Spaten's Optimator kompt all the way aus Deutschland  . . . and still cost 50% less than SA in national distribution? And why wouldn't SA customers be tempted to switch when "New Coke double bock clone" doesn't taste anything like last year's SA Double Bock???

If this trend keeps up there should be a corresponding 50% increase in home brewing...

And then Dexter emailed me the next day with the following, the punchline to the entire rant --- and a reaction-to-prices that craft brewers ought to take seriously.

With home brewing in the mix, this move to "Variable Pricing" could become a social move as well as an economic decision for some customers. What's a craft beer lover to do when the prices for his favorite commercial porters and stouts and maple brown ales start inching skyward??

Okay okay...as a craft beer drinker you are already in a social subset. When the guy at the next table says "Simcoe", you know it's bitter, piney hop, not the newest addition to the Dow.

But do you stay with the group who can still afford to "pay the price to be the man"? Do you sacrifice other marginal purchases to keep buying the IPA that won a medal in Denver? OR do you truck on down to the Brew Supply store and talk to the owner for 30 minutes about which oak chips are best for your next brew project.

As a home brewer you will still be rubbing shoulders with guys who flew to Hilo to pick up 2 growlers of Mehana Hawaiian Crow Porter,  but you will also know 8 other people who can brew a better porter and will be happy to show you how to brew it as well.

The whole experience is more participatory...instead of being a consumer waiting  at the end of a long chain, subject to the whim of bean counters and distributors, you become the whole chain. Instead of calling the brewer at Kona Brewing in Kailua-Kona to ask him what Seasonal he decided to put on tap next week, you are corralling him at the Kona Beer Festival to ask him about the  type and percentage of specialty grains in his Barleywine.

It's a whole different outlook. Spassky said "Chess is like Life" But Fisher said "Chess IS Life". But he didn't have to make room for a used Frigidaire® in his garage, and his wife isn't pestering him to make some more Midas Touch.

Anyway, there's not much I can add to Dexter's comments except this: Hey, craft brewer! You wanted educated customers. But be careful what you wish for, because you may educate them right out of your market. PS: Connection to Anderson's Long Tail theory? I think Dexter's closing comments about "participatory" consumption and the consumer as the "whole chain" make a nice corrollary to the theory.

Historians and the Preservation of Newspaper Content, Part 2

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Part 1 --- Part 2 --- Part 3 --- Part 4

As I mentioned in the previous post, in the past decade or so, some large newspapers have digitized their contents. For example, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe have all been stored as digital complete runs, -- meaning every word/image of every issue ever published has been scanned into a digital “archive.”

Access to those archives are managed through a company called ProQuest, which earns revenue by licensing use of these archives. You can visit the Globe’s website, for example, and, by paying a small fee, gain access to and search the entire Globe archive. ProQuest also licenses the use of these digital runs to university and college libraries where students and faculty can access them for free. (If you need to do research of any kind, a university library is an incredible resource.)

So in theory, the content of paper newspapers have been preserved. BUT: What's not clear is the future of the electronic versions of newspapers, nor is it clear what will happen to the web contents of defunct newspapers. Remember: an online version of a newspaper is different from its print version. The ads are different. The content differs, etc.

This is important for historians in particular. In the past thirty or so years, a number of historians have studied newspaper advertising as a way of analyzing shifts in consumer tastes, in the rhetoric of advertising, and so forth. (See especially the work of Roland Marchand.) Indeed, advertisements are key primary documents for historical research.

But as I noted above, the ad content of a paper newspaper is typically quite different than that its electronic counterpart. Moreover, the ad content of an online edition is dynamic: it changes from day to day.

Think about it: If I visit, say, the New York Times website and search for an article published in 1985, it will come up with either no ads, OR with ads attached from the 2009 edition. What I won't see is the context that surrounded that article when it first appeared in 1985. For historians, that's a problem, so from historians’ perspective, how and what gets saved matters.

What's not clear to me is if anyone has pondered this problem. I perused the website of the American Historical Association, the main professional organization for professional historians. If they've got a plan,they're keeping it under wraps. (I kind of doubt they do. Their own website is astoundingly ill-maintained.)

NEXT: Preserving and archiving newspapers' paper trails, their websites, and their digital editions.

Historians and the Preservation of Newspaper Content, Part 1

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Part 1 --- Part 2 --- Part 3 --- Part 4

Loyal Reader Dexter asked a couple of good questions the other day.

What, he wondered, will happen to the newspapers that are closing? Have historians thought about how to save the papers’ contents once they’re gone?

Good questions and ones of enormous importance to historians like me. For decades-going-into-centuries, newspapers have functioned as one of historians' main sources of information. Think of a newspaper as an eyewitness account of say, life, in 1880.

Nowadays, of course, we have a wealth of "eyewitness" accounts of contemporary life. Historians of the future are gonna be overwhelmed with sources.

The short answer to his questions are:

In many cases, maybe even most cases, the contents have already been saved/preserved. Here’s why: For the past thirty or forty years, the owners of many newspapers have microfilmed their contents on a regular basis. Every month, or, for some papers, every three or four months, an employee gathers paper copies and sends them off to the filming service. A few weeks later, the service ships reels of film to the newspaper.

In the 1960s and after, many big newspapers also used microfilming to create film-based archives of their contents back to day one of the newspaper’s publication. So, for example, the entire contents of every issue of the New York Times has been available on microfilm for decades. Microfilm isn’t searchable, of course, except by eye, but it’s been a valuable tool for historians for years and years.

A few years ago, the Times also began digitizing that film, so that every word of every issue is also available as a digital database that can be searched using keywords. (That, by the way, completely altered life as we know it for historians like me.)

So in theory, most newspapers have been saved. The exceptions are very tiny weeklies, of the sort found in rural parts of the country. Here in Iowa, for example, there are a still a few of these small operations that cover strictly local news (school lunch menus, deaths, weddings, town council meetings and the like). My guess is that most of those small operations can’t afford to pay for filming services, and so they likely save paper copies.

Happily, in both small towns and in large cities, public libraries also function as repositories for newspapers, either in paper form (which takes up a lot of space) or, more often, by owning reels of the microfilmed copies. So even if a small town newspaper goes under, it's safe to assume that copies of the newspaper will still exist in at least one place.

NEXT TIME: Digitization, newspapers' paper trail, and perservation.