It seems like there is a fairly straightforward deal possible to save the business of putting out newspapers (the news is fine, doesn’t need to change!). Make it a much cheaper version of the cable business, where subscribers buy into a much-enhanced version of something they get a basic version of for free. Major ISPs […]
Category Archives: media
snark: too big to fail?
February 22, 2009 – 11:24 am
Walter Kirn’s review of David Denby’s book Snark is pretty fun reading: He wants to correct and restrain, using scholarship and logic, perhaps the keenest, most reflexive, prehistoric and anarchic of simple human pleasures, short of eating or achieving orgasm. The act of laughter, this would be. Or, for Denby, the act of low, illicit […]
saving journalism cluster-frak
February 10, 2009 – 1:20 pm
Newspapers and magazines are losing money very quickly. News content remains very popular, but most of it is available for free. News aggregator sites serve newspaper content to large audiences for free, and Craigslist has killed the major source of ad revenue that newspapers need, and people are used to getting magazine content for free […]
the problem with having something to protect
August 11, 2008 – 9:00 am
Deep in the depths of the dot-com bust, when I was lucky enough to have work of any kind (in my case it was commuting 200 miles each day contracting for Cisco), the people I worked with were fatalistic about the future of the work we did. Many people thought the money had been drained […]
NY Times magazine on flickr: fail
April 29, 2008 – 11:12 am
1576684627 In an article about Flickr by Virginia Heffernan (“Sepia No More” in the New York Times Magazine), she bemoans what she sees as the dominant aesthetic on Flickr: As art-school photographers continue to shoot on film, embrace chiaroscuro and resist prettiness, a competing style of picture has been steadily refined online: the Flickr photograph. […]
News Media vs. Web aggregators: what deal can stop the race to the bottom?
April 18, 2008 – 2:24 pm
In a recent post on Hitwise by Heather Hopkins, “Content Aggregation is King?,” the bind that existing news media is in is highlighted again: “Aggregators are taking a larger piece of the pie but the size of the pie is growing with visits to content creators and all News and Media websites growing. The trouble […]
Not “out of print” at all, just out to lunch
March 31, 2008 – 10:56 am
Eric Alterman’s article (“Out of Print, The death and life of the American newspaper” in The New Yorker) about journalism is wrongheaded and off-base. As someone who really loves newspapers wants them to survive, I was surprised by how inadequate to the circumstances it was. His example of an alternative, the Huffington Post, is a […]
holy f*
June 27, 2007 – 3:01 am
Yikes, f8 looks like a monster, either a sea-change or the beginning of one. I guess openness really is built in to the way people want to use the Internet. Now, if only Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google would follow suit… come to think of it, if only the US mobile data market was opened up […]
authentic media, exhibit b — pictures of the family of the person who stole my cell phone posted to my flickr account
August 15, 2006 – 6:50 pm
My cell phone was stolen last Friday. I had it disconnected and arranged to get a replacement. It had been set up with the excellent service from ShoZu to automatically upload all pictures taken with the phone to Flickr. So today, completely surprisingly, I find pictures on my Flickr account of the family of the […]