With the demise of newspapers all around us, you’d think the AP could put out better articles. Case in point is an article circulated by the AP today with a headline that screams more Americans have no religion that in years past.

First off, the headline is misleading at best. A 0.8 percent increase really isn’t the main gist of the article nor is it the most relevant factoid in the article.

More Americans say they have no religion (AP via Y! News).

“Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey.”

Second, the article is poorly structured and misses key details that I expect an article like this to include. For example, what does it mean to not have a religion? Does it mean that person is an athiest and does not believe in a higher power? Does it mean a person is agnostic and chooses to not have a religion but believes in a higher power?

The article lacks a summary at the beginning to say in a nutshell what it is about or to provide a roadmap, is disjointed and provides related details in separate areas of the article, and lacks clear thought. I admit that I’m guilty of these violations at various times but I’m not a professional journalist paid to dispense the news.

Building on my first example, above, why is it that the 15 percent statement is separate from and not tied to the statement more than 8 paragraphs down about 12 percent of Americans believing in a higher power but not a personal God? It seems those stats go together but are not tied together or contrasted. So, is the 12 percent group a subset of the other? Are they separate groups? If a subset, what does that say about the remaining 3 percent? Other questions left unanswered include whether the study includes the same respondents from the earlier versions of the study, what answers respondents gave to why they changed religions, and what was done to accommodate people who did not speak English or Spanish in the sample population (is there underrepresentation in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islams as a result?).

Please, don’t make me find and read the study to better understand for myself.

NBC has decided that it is still 1950 and it is still in control. Back then there was very little competition for eyeballs and radio was the only real alternative to quickly get news.

So, as a result, NBC forced most US viewers to sit through more than 12 hours of news reports, photos, and video clips from the opening ceremony before they could actually watch it. While the rest of the world (and US locales, like Detroit, that also get Canadian CBC stations) watched it live, as it happened, most of the US was subject to a poorly executed ruse to make us think nothing had happened. No matter how much demand there was in the marketplace, NBC resisted and ignored the resentment it engendered with such a move.

But this is 2008, during the beginnings of the Internet Age. There are already several ways around blackouts and more will come. The New York Times wrote an article about some primitive attempts to get around NBC’s attempts at blacking out the US market but ignored a couple of other key technologies that will play a greater role in the future.

Tape Delay by NBC Faces End Run by Online Fans – NYTimes.com
NBCâ??s decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country to their computers to poke holes in NBCâ??s technological wall â?? by finding newsfeeds on foreign broadcastersâ?? Web sites and by watching clips of the ceremonies on YouTube and other sites.

The NY Times article missed out on two very important technologies that worked effectively: proxies and torrents.

Proxies are computers set up to relay internet traffic through. By routing your Internet traffic through a proxy, the web site you’re visiting thinks you are the proxy. I was able to use a proxy based in the UK to watch some BBC coverage of the Olympics intended solely for a UK audience.

Torrent is a peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing protocol. It is even more decentralized than other, previous p2p networks such as Napster. And, unlike Napster, the torrent technology is likely to not violate copyright laws. It has legitimate purposes and its use for copyright infringement is incidental to the technology.

A quick search with Y! Search found a few different torrents of the opening ceremony, including :

• http://www.mininova.org/tor/1676005
• http://www.sumotorrent.com/de/details/1499015/2008%20Beijing%20Olympics%20Opening%20Ceremony%20Full%20(HD).html

If the television industry does not change soon it will be hurting as much as the big music labels. Like the music labels, the television industry is no longer in control of the distribution. The Internet and other new technologies have disrupted that part of its business model. To survive, it must deliver on what people demand. Otherwise it will lose even more people to other media and distribution methods.

In four years, Olympic events will need to be broadcast in nearly real time. Otherwise, viewers will look elsewhere to satisfy their demands. Those who were foiled at watching on YouTube and other online video sites will prepare ahead of time and arrange for torrents from those viewing the events live. Technology will improve between now and then. I predict that an open source p2p streaming service will debut before then, intended to serve as an alternative broadcast outlet, but it will used to also share events with a friend in a blacked out area.

BTW: Beyond making viewers wait for old-news, NBC blew its actual coverage of the opening ceremonies in many ways, including its intense focus on getting close-ups of performers during a show meant for viewing from a distance, its badly executed cuts for commercials, its ridiculous and irrelevant color commentary throughout the show, and its lazy choice to paraphrase a speech at the end by the head of the Chinese Olympic committee instead of providing a translation (they had enough time and money to find an hire a real translator).