Street Performers and the Ongoing Encore

It’s a nice night. It’s sunset and more groups of people gather more outside with their coffee and tea than inside the small bistro. A group of homeless gather around the night’s hearth; one with a guitar, all tossing in their ante in-time with the running poker game.

The sound of the guitar carries, as does the sounds of laughter and conversation. Above this is the waxing and waning whine of a nearby theremin.

The theremin is an odd apparatus of an instrument. It stands nearly as tall as its operator. A construct of framed metal that serves an a support for the instrument itself which is played by moving the hands over the instrument’s surface at varying speeds and distance, producing a tone and volume that varies as the hands move in relation to the instrument itself. All the while, the hand never actually touches the instrument.

It isn’t every day that you can come across a street musician playing a theremin for tips. The guitar player is a familiar sight from along the city’s main drags, often with a guitar case or hat containing a modest handful of cash.

Even the sporadic horn soloist or small group can be come across on the street, but rarely, if ever, is there a theremin player.

Many cities require artists to acquire a permit to perform on the street. Whole litanies of arguments have surfaced to combat this ranging from freedom of artistic expression to the feasibility of enforcement. How many permits will a municipality issue? How many can they issue? At what point is the often-modest fine for infraction no longer enough to enforce?

While many cities have a permit involved with street performing, most performers don’t often find themselves in line for one. The most cities can do is be out fining performers. Cities can’t just throw performers in jail, nor can they be out constantly enforcing any permit law in place.

Also, artists can’t all expect to be able to set up anywhere they want and perform, while also expecting to make a bit extra in tips. What comes to mind is a scene along the main drags of Anytown, USA where artists with all kinds of instruments imaginable line the streets performing. The noise is deafening.

So far, this scene has yet to manifest. Street performers will always exist. Very often, the street performer is someone who is picked out as a nuisance for the “street” they have brought to the term “performer”. These folks don’t bring in a whole lot of money, nor are they necessarily trying to become famous. Usually, it’s some combination of both that they are after.

Currently, the mode of operation for business owners who have businesses whose stoops are often used as a stage is to shuffle performers on their way. The performer usually just finds another spot and continues their performance.

Nobody is hurt. Nobody’s business is permanently disrupted. A spot in jail is reserved for worthy recipients; life goes on.

It is often on the street that the best performances unfold. Oddly mixed jazz quartets, guitar players, singers, theremin players, and painters painting scenes of the street mime who is acting out the flow of traffic; the beat goes on.

More Newspapers Fold as Online Media Progresses

Last night, journalists at The Seattle Times put their paper to bed for the last time. The San Francisco Chronicle has recently made severe cuts to its staff in order to be able to consider possible mergers with producers of other local newspapers in order to save itself if no other opportunities for salvation come up. Both The Seattle Times and The San Francisco Chronicle are papers that have a history dating back to the days of The Civil War and even before. Papers with similar legacies across America and the world are facing the very same dilemma.

With many newsrooms downsizing and some papers calling it quits all together, the days of the “two newspaper town” are conceivably coming to an end. It is doubtful that the quality or quantity of news available will diminish; in fact, the technology that is replacing the conventional newspaper is drastically increasing the amount of information available.

Citing a recent Pew Research Center report, The New York Times reported that “the internet overtook print newspapers as a [primary] news source this year” in its January 4, 2009 edition. Respondents to the Pew Research Center’s poll were given three choices pertaining to where they received the majority of their news from: the internet, newspapers, or ‘other’, and were allowed to specify more than one source. The report found that roughly 40 percent of Americans get their national and international news from an online source, while roughly 35 percent get it from newspapers.

This, however, is not a death knell for newspapers. It is now up to papers to find equilibrium between putting out a daily printed edition and managing online content if print editions are to remain. Most papers are making the transition online almost wholly, as is the current case with The Seattle Times. There is still value in a daily newspaper. Having the information contained within a concise package of sorts and catered to a particular locale can be amazingly convenient.

A newspaper can more easily be scoured over during a meal, on a bus, or at any given time when being “plugged in” isn’t ideal. People like newspapers. A newspaper can be folded and stuffed into a pocket, reused to catch paint from getting on the carpet or to wash glass without leaving streaks, it can be used as an umbrella or even insulation for fine china during a move. Not even the newest model laptops are that convenient.

A newspaper’s editorial section is a perfect example. Generally, when people are perusing the internet bookmarking pages they’d return to or subscribing to podcasts they would listen to, it is very often material they agree with. That is to say, a person generally won’t be bookmarking the page of an editorialist that enrages them with their opinions week after week. A newspaper will include opinions from across the spectrum, allowing people to take in a much fuller scope of opinion on a subject.

Not everyone is able to make the jump to an all-online news service, and an under-informed public is dangerous, especially when living in a democracy. It is the public that ultimately levies the decisions; in a democracy, the ultimate power is the vote, and an under-informed public’s vote is of considerably less value. The news media is the first the primary source of information for the public at large. It is the news media that keeps the attentive public informed on current issues, allowing them to make better decisions because they have background information on an issue.

If a ballot measure reads “increase sales tax by .50%”, the first reaction is that this would cost the individual, the voter, more money on the whole, so they will not vote for the measure. However, and informed voter may understand that their locale needs this extra funding to rise out of a deficit, or to fund projects badly needed, and therefore the measure may actually have a better chance at passing because the voter’s charge is then to make a decision on weather that .50% sales tax increase is in their best interest given where the money is going.

While a voter pamphlet will help flush this information out (though it can be a complicated read), it is the news media that helps break it down to a cost/benefit analysis based on the individual versus the interest of the locale at large. The dialogue that takes place within the news media is the primary source for information in voters’ decision making.

The advent of the internet which has led to the wide proliferation of the blogosphere, including audio blogs that appear in the form of a podcast, has so widened the social dialogue to include such a wide number and variety of opinions that the volume is often deafening. The reporting and editorializing of current events is no longer limited to press-affiliated reporters and columnists but is now open to anyone with something to share.

Broadcast media producers and bloggers all get their information from one original source: newspaper writers. With most all information that goes into these mediums coming from these writers (weather they are writing for an actual print paper or an online edition), so if such severe cuts occur in newspapers, what will happen to these sources of information?

Bloggers also teeter on the edge of ethical journalism, often allowing considerably more opinion than fact through, so if there are no more print sources to serve as an anchor to fact then will news media eventually be reduced to a wiki? The age-old adage of ‘consider your source’ is becoming more difficult to maintain as primary sources on the internet are being drowned out.

Enjoying such unmitigated access to information gives people an unprecedented freedom. It is now that one can open a web browser and access news from nearly any region in the world, post an opinion piece on a publicly hosted site, or provide comments (in effect, editorialize) on another’s opinion. The detriment of such unmitigated access to information lies in discerning what is correct, and what is relevant.