A suit that just doesn't fit

Here's the headline/byline from the Globe and Mail - "Lawsuit could make designated drivers liable for intoxicated passengers: Woman, who leapt from moving car during domestic dispute, sues driver".

Inga Richardson was having a domestic dispute with her common-law spouse Joey Sanayhie one night after drinking, and she jumped out of the moving vehicle he was driving. Ms. Richardson's lawyers contend that Mr. Sanayhie was aware she had previously jumped from a moving boat when agitated and that, as such, he should have been more careful to restrain her before she jumped from the moving car.

I think this lawsuit is absurd.

Adults who drink are still adults

A person who operates a vehicle is responsible to ensure that minors are using functional restraint systems properly. Children who are not properly restrained are the responsibility of the operator of the vehicle. Adult passengers, however, are responsible for themselves and the proper use of seat belts themselves (at least, that's how it is here in Ontario). In the case of a person who was purchasing and consuming alcohol from a retail establishment, that person must be understood to have been an adult (since it is against the law to sell liquor to minors) and, as such would be responsible for their behaviour when they are passengers in someone else's vehicle.

Drunkenness is not an excuse

People who "drink and drive" are held responsible for damage they cause as a result of driving while intoxicated. In fact, driving while intoxicated is itself a crime. If these laws can be upheld, then we accept that a person who does something against the law while intoxicated is still accountable.

Applied to this case, the woman who jumped out of the car, regardless of the fact that she was not operating the vehicle, is still an adult responsible for her actions, even if she is in a state of inebriation when making her decisions - she cannot use her intoxicated state to escape her own responsibility for deciding to jump out of a moving vehicle.

The new status quo - drink responsibly

People who choose to get drunk make that decision to get drunk before they get drunk. Our laws make it clear that damages caused while drunk are not mitigated by being drunk - in fact they are exacerbated because of the stigma to prevent someone even thinking they might escape responsibility by appealing to their drunken state. So, for example, driving is not a crime. Driving while intoxicated is a crime, even if you don't commit any other crime while driving (you don't have to speed, or hit a fire hydrant or telephone pole, or run a red light while drunk - driving itself while drunk is the crime).

This is why the lingo is not "serve responsibly", or "chaperon responsibly", or "bartend responsibly", "be a pal responsibly". The onus sits squarely on the shoulders of the individual who decides to drink.

The bottom line is this: if you get drunk, you remain fully responsible for your actions.

Precedent would threaten the industry

Once this transfer of responsibility is upheld, what person would expose themselves to the risk of being held responsible for the actions of a drunken fool? If there are increasingly less people willing to take that risk, then there will be less support for people to drink; with less support for drinking, there'd be less drinking; with less drinking, there'd be less purchasing of alcoholic beverages - hold the phone...

The revenue stream

When you think about wine, and beer, and alcoholic beverages, there are many iconic brands and identities out there, as well as regions that have become very closely linked to their grape-growing or beer brewing. Whether it's Jack Daniels in some country bar; or James Bond's insistence that a proper martini is made with vodka and is shaken, not stirred; or the classic bottle of Bordeaux wine breathing on the table of a sumptuous spread or casually shared on a blanket with a baguette and some foie gras sitting under the Eiffel Tower... It may be surprising for some to realize that the number-one retailer of alcoholic beverages on planet earth is Ontario's very own LCBO, with sales in 2008 reaching almost $4.27 billion, dividends to the Ontario Provincial Government exceeding $1 billion that same year, and almost $1 billion in PST and GST going to the provincial and federal governments over the same period.

The LCBO is a cash cow for the government. If the social and ethical considerations weren't sufficient to squash this ridiculous suit, the threat to the governments' coffers should be.

Can the Web save newspapers?

This recent article in the Toronto Star suggests I've got to go a little further beyond my previous breakdown.

Comparing news to music is a woefully inadequate justification for a newspaper attempting to charge for its content. iTunes was successful because it listened to what both artists and their fans wanted - for fans to be able to buy as little as they want, not just want the producers pushed. If I like "a song or two," it used to be that I'd still be forced to buy the whole album, or just not buy anything at all. Today, the artist can get a sale because someone can go ahead and just buy a song or two.

But the issue is that a song is a single inimitablething. If I want to listen to Stevie Wonder sing Isn't She Lovely? I can't substitute that with Frankie Lymon singing Why Do Fools Fall In Love? They are two different songs. News is a totally different thing - if a plane crashes, who owns that information? Certainly not the New York Times, or Reuters or Associated Press. News is often public. If I'm walking down the street and witness a collision between a taxi and a streetcar, is there someone standing by to charge me to watch the emergency crews respond? Life isn't owned by anyone who can charge for it.

What, exactly, does a newspaper company sell? "News"? Stevie Wonder doesn't sell "music", and you can get music anywhere. Stevie Wonder sells "Stevie Wonder's music", and there's only one place on earth where you can get Stevie Wonder's music - from Stevie Wonder. That's why he can sell.

Let's cut to the chase - no newspaper is going to make money attempting to charge people for news that is readily available everywhere else for free.

So, if a newspaper company is going to survive, what is it going to sell? It's got to sell something that no one else is selling. What is the New York Times selling?

• something for New York Times fans to read
• opinion about what's happening in the news
• a target market for advertisers who wish to reach the kind of people who read the New York Times

What must, therefore, come forward, is the opinionof New York Times writers. The analysis, the insight, the punditry, those who speak to the issues with the New York Times tone and culture and voice and style. You can't get that from the Wall Street Journal or USA Today.

This opinion can be disseminated on paper but, again, why bother? Paper production carries with it too much cost to be recovered before profit kicks in. People want information when, where and how they want it, and that is increasingly via electronic and mobile media.

As such, I would suggest that the answer to the question of the Star article is "no", the web cannot save newspapers because the web is electronic media that competes squarely with print media. The segment of the population who still values sitting in the living room on a Sunday afternoon going through the Sunday paper is shrinking, and that's driving newspapers' shrinking revenues.

Nor should news outlets bother even asking the question. The paper is not to be saved -- it's the opinion of the news that's to be disseminated via media.

And, I've said it before and will say it again - news outlets must value as a strength their expertise in and obligation to provide legitimacy to news. It's one thing to get a tweet saying "Michael Jackson died," but we all waited to hear from "a real news source" that it was in fact true. News outlets have built a system of fact-checking that is second to none. We, society, need to know that what's happening is what really is happening. Anyone can start a rumour and, these days, get that rumour around the world and back in literally minutes. Today, more than ever, we need systematic rigour to confirm that some news is in fact reality, truth, or at least verifiable.

Standard Oil understood that, while the window of lamp oil demand was closing, motor oil demand was opening up a big door. They sold oil, and would sell to whomever was buying. Nearly 100 years after the breakup of Standard Oil, its two largest pieces, Exxon and Mobil, are one again, and still relevant after so many eras have come and gone.

News services have

• the skills and infrastructure to help us determine what is news, and
• the experience to help us interpret what to think about it.

The press is important because freedom of the press is necessary to a free society. The "press" must transform to stay relevant, and continue to contribute to, support and protect freedom.

The medium shouldn't have become the message

A few weeks ago I read an article in the Toronto Star, called Connect or Die, about Jeff Jarvis, media guru. In it, he mentioned that newpapers should evolve or die, and that death would come to the industry relatively quickly.

Today I read about the bankruptcy of the parent company to the venerable Chicago Sun-Times. I've thought about this for a while, and the two stories highlight the issue that I'm now writing about.

For too many of the industrial age publishers, the important part of the word "newspaper" to them was "paper." It should always have been "news."

Paper was just the medium, the message should have been the news. As it turns out, the paper itself became the message. And now that paper is waning vs the electronic media, they're hard-pressed (no pun intended) to adjust to the shift.

Paper, hard copy, is yesterday for many reasons. The industrial age was very tactile, very physical. Paper was tactile, physical. At the same time, there wasn't much going on in society, relative to all that tantalizes the attention today. For many, the newspaper was more than "just the news": 

• it was their window on the world at a time when they probably would never see other lands let alone travel outside their home continent or city;
• it was their connection to others, providing something to talk about;
• it was their entertainment. "Reading the Sunday paper" became as ritualistic as church, with sections laid out all over the floor around the big chair;
• it even gave people a reason to get out of the house. Indeed, Louis Armstrong even wrote a song titled "I Guess I'll Get the Paper and Go Home", because people actually did that. And while out, they might sit in a coffee shop, or stop to talk to the grocer or general store manager, or take the paper and sit on a park bench...

Today, we are much more mobile, much more travelled, much more connected to the world both in terms of immigration and the simple exposure to other cultures as well as electronically through television, the internet and all the information and access it offers. The internet also means we don't have to go out as much. I remember doing research in libraries. Today I have access to much more information online from home. When I was a kid, the thing to do after school was go out and play - street hockey, bike riding...today, neighbourhood streets are devoid of kids doing such industrial age things. Today, everything is on a screen - movies, video games... kids don't "go out to play anymore" (I stand corrected, they've got portable games they play in groups now)...

As I write this, my wife is saying "isn't it cool how we don't have to write letters to a talk show anymore, we can email them in real time and actually participate in the discussion live?" Indeed.

Newpapers are dying because their focus was on printing paper. Society's focus has shifted, and they've been slow to keep abreast. We now live in the information age. Information is key. People aren't consuming less news, we're saturated with information, email, RSS feeds, websites, online subscriptions, tweets (which I haven't even gotten into yet)... We are on online fantasy leagues for every sport under the sun, and then some...we are online watching the outcomes of every facet of a game that can be bet on, and we place these bets with online, off-shore books because it's so much less sleazy to place a bet on the sanitary interface of a computer than with a shady character in an alley or down by the shipping yards...

So the problem is not that we don't want news; we want news more flexibly, more dynamically, more now, than paper, in all its static glory, can support. We are also a more environmentally-concerned generation than our factory-building, pollution-spewing industrial grandparents and parents. Cutting down trees to print yesterday's news today just doesn't seem worthwhile when, with a few clicks, we can read 6 different views on the news today, with columns and blogs to enhance our understanding. People use their cellphones with text-messaging to announce that the subway is delayed at the next station - these are things that paper is too static and slow to support. As so many pieces of our lives are delivered to us on our computers, cellphones and PDAs, we lose any connection to a newspaper - it's just not very relevant anymore.

But, make no mistake - newspaper printers should have, and still can, function in today's society. They are, after all, experts at gathering and disseminating information. If they distribute it online, and restore focus on the news, there may be no need to lament the obsolesence of the newspaper, anymore than we remember saddles (the issue was transportation, not the mode), or 8-track tapes (the issue was the music, not what it was played on). And news organizations are also where we look for verification of news. When the word began to spread that Michael Jackson had died, people were hearing about it plenty before the "official word" was provided through "the real news" - anyone can start a rumour, but hearing it on network news gave it a sense of "ah, now it's official." And, of course, when there is news to make, a press release is where an official statement is offered to "the media", who can then convey it to the public. Imagine a news organization disseminating press releases by blog, text messages, RSS and Twitter subscriptions...with an advertising footer in each? 

To that, I say "Extra! Extra! Email/text/tweet all about it!"