We're getting a lot of new sign-ups, so I've decided to write a bit about what we hope to achieve content-wise and organizationally here at Hotbox.

First of all, for those new and old alike — welcome to the site! We've done a lot lately to make the software much more usable and have plans to provide multi-platform mobile functionality for content submission in the future. Please bear with us as we work out the few remaining bugs in the system; what we're doing is a little at the edge of our system's capabilities and it's taken some effort to get it to where it is now (Also: Big Thank-You to the JomSocial development team, who recently helped us troubleshoot an issue with our community software). 

Here's what we're trying to accomplish. Support for marijuana policy reform is anywhere from 44-60% in favour of decrim/legalization, meaning that it's only a matter of time before the issue reaches supermajority status and keeping the same ludicrous penalties for cultivating a simple plant will appear as insane as it actually is. The liberalization of drug laws in the United States will cause a ripple effect throughout the developed world, insomuch as one of the most ardent supporters of zero-tolerance drug policy will have severely changed its course. 

So, apparently Old Media is dying. The following clip from this week’s Daily Show very enthusiastically discusses some of the difficulties traditional forms of media currently face. More after the jump.



Is Print a dead medium? Much evidence points to that conclusion; between the massive delays caused by a print publishing cycle (Daily newspapers have a lag time of about 12-24 hours; weeklies can have a lag time of up to six days. Magazines are produced months before their shelve date), the enormous costs of producing a print publication and the immense competition provided by newer media, the so-called “Death of Print” seems inevitable. Yet at the same time, there is some irony in the above clip — television faces many of the problems print does without much of its added value.

Really, the driving evolutionary force in media right now is the Internet. That everyone from CNN News anchors to Washington Post columnists are now on Twitter is just one way in which the established media has tried to make use of this new technology (And rather miserably, at that). Blogging and web-based news outlets like the Huffington Post or the Drudge Report have demonstrated how quickly net-based production cycles can produce late-breaking content without a tenth the overhead traditional media requires. Yes, Broadcast media makes the production speed of Print seem incredibly lethargic, but the mere requirement of Broadcast media to occupy time-slots imposes its own inherent lag-time. To overcome this, 24 hour news channels such as CNN have emerged, but even this is slow compared to Internet distribution. What’s more, to realize the continuous feed required for a 24 hour news cycle, much content is repeated over and over, and quite a lot of it is mediocre at best (Ironically, a continually-profitable topic for the Daily Show is the banality its own medium experiences when conducting a continuous news cycle).

Print has, in my mind, some enduring value. You can archive it short-term fairly easily, you can read it in the bath, leave it on your coffee table for bored guests to read,  receive it at your doorstep with regularity. The doom and gloom coming from Print media is, in my mind, more due to the fact they’re not able to create value-added content in the way Broadcast is.

Think of how Red Bull does their sports promotions. A decade ago, nobody had heard of Red Bull and their terrible tasting (yet effective) magic elixor, and now their motocross and airplane slalom events are the modern equivalent of the X-Games in the ’90s. Their use of media is a good example of how Broadcast media are in some capacities more suited for new media applications: every event is recorded and the clips are sliced apart, put in ads, posted on YouTube, replayed on sports channels and more. They get a lot of value from their content. While it may be expensive as hell to have giant air-filled plane racing pylons dotting an entire harbour, it becomes a measured investment when one considers Red Bull’s massive ability to reuse content.

Broadcast news agencies also reuse content quite well. To use a Canadian example, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) has both radio and television news endeavours, both of which are reused as web content. However, they also have a team dedicated to writing web content to supplement video content, while other textual content is provided through wire articles. This use of three media in a single conglomeration is the heart of New media — no longer is it acceptable to be merely a newspaper or a radio station or a television station. The norm is now to be all three.

For a time, Print media was able to use the transferability of text to aid in content proliferation on the web. By this I mean you can place text in RSS feeds and have it proliferate via other web applications (Hotbox’s Smokkr.com website is a good example of this in action). Video was really unwieldy and it would take users hours to download a single clip. Now, with Flash-based video streaming sites like YouTube and the proliferation of high-speed Internet access, video is as accessible as text. This means competition between the two media is now as vivid on the Internet as it was in the meatspace a half century ago. But to portray it as such is to really miss the opportunity provided by Internet media — the ability to transcend medium-created barriers and creatively juxtapose related work in a single content frame.