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Viewing all posts tagged "dinosaurs"
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”It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
Clay Shirky writing in his blog post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. This is only a small snippet of a long, thoughtful, depressing, and ultimately hopeful analysis of the huge changes the Internet is forcing on newspapers and book publishers.
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”Undeniably, there is money to be made in digital publishing with free reader access, but whether that revenue leads to profits depends upon the scale and scope of the organization. The potential revenue does not appear to be of the magnitude that will support the massive operations of existing news organizations. What works in today’s web landscape are lean and mean organizations with little or no management bureaucracy — operations where nearly every employee is working on producing actual content.
John Gruber hits it out of the park in his article Charging for Access to News Sites.
This seems to be the crucial factor separating the news sites making money from the news sites hemorrhaging money. As Gruber points out, the old media dinosaurs who refuse to see the light about online profitability are precisely those whose jobs are all about management, and not about content.
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”The issue is not saving newspapers. The issue is, among other things, seeing that good journalism survives. It’s also about making sure that people who “consume” media demand better than they’ve been getting, by persuading them to become activists in the way they consume.
Boing Boing guest blogger Dan Gillmor writing in Saving Newspapers, Part MMIX: Collude and Conspire. Here’s some cold water for the increasingly hysterical “save our newspapers!!!1” crowd. They’re not going to get saved.
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Saving newspapers
Fred Clark examines Walter Isaacson’s recent Time cover story:
His big solution, in short, is that somebody needs to invent some kind of convenient micropayment system that would allow newspapers to charge for the online content we’re currently giving away for free. Web advertising, Isaacson figures, will never produce sufficient revenue to cover the cost of producing all that free content.
Well, maybe that would help. Partly. Perhaps. Although I’m far from convinced that newspapers are really suffering from a problem of insufficient revenue as much as they are from a problem of foolishly inappropriate revenue expectations.
Oh yes all that, and then the added problem of any such magical micropayment system breaking the freaking Internet. As in, suddenly an entire class of Web pages are available only to users with Web browsers and operating systems blessed by content providers. It would be like the old browser wars all over again, except that anyone using a minority Web browser or operating system will be left out in the cold. A good rule of thumb: if you’re considering a Web policy that will lock some users out, it’s a bad idea. Don’t do it.
But I agree with Fred that newspapers are dying and there’s little we can do to prevent that. What we need to do, somehow, is figure out how to preserve the best qualities of newspapers in this new media world.
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”Stop and think about where you are reading this column. If you are one of the million or so people who are reading it in a newspaper that landed on your doorstop or that you picked up at the corner, you are in the minority.
I’m guilty as charged. (From this NYT article about the Christian Science Monitor’s announcement that, after more than 100 years, it will cease publishing a daily paper. It’s only going to get worse from here.)
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”Last week, almost 1,000 jobs were eliminated in the American newspaper industry, perhaps the bloodiest week yet of a year where many papers are fighting for their lives. You read about the great names — the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Globe, the San Jose Mercury News — as if reading the obituary page. Rich cities like San Francisco can no longer support a profitable daily paper. […] And here’s the great paradox: all of this bad news is coming at a time when the audience and reach of many newspapers has never been greater. The Internet may kill the daily newspaper as we know it, but it’s allowed some papers to increase their readership by tenfold.
All these old-media types have a right to be bitter. Working in journalism right now can really suck — despite all the undoubtedly cool things that are happening online.
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”…in that world of the perpetual present tense — post it now, fix it later, update constantly — old-time, persnickety editing may be a luxury in which only a few large news operations will indulge. It will be an artisanal product, like monastery honey and wooden yachts.
NYT’s Lawrence Downes on the dying art of copy editing. (via Syntax of Things, via Maud Newton)
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”But I also noticed this line: “Unlike traditional, mainstream media, blogs often adopt a specific point of view. Critics complain they can contain unchecked facts, are poorly edited and use unreliable sources.” And this distinguishes them from the mainstream press exactly … how?
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Can we finally bury the "bloggers only comment, don't report" canard?
Now that Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo political blog has won a George Polk Award for legal reporting, can we please officially bury the tired old nonsense about blogging not being real journalism?
That’s fantastic news.
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Kindle not the game-changer everyone craves
The E-newspaper of the future has finally arrived. At this point, though, it’s too late to change anything.
Amazon’s newly-unveiled Kindle is supposedly going to change publishing forever. Based on all the photos I’ve seen, it looks like it’s about the size and thickness of a Moleskine notebook, and while it might not be the prettiest bit of consumer electronics released this year it does come with a smart-looking pleather case.
The most interesting item on its insanely huge product page is this one:
Top U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; top magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes—all auto-delivered wirelessly.
That’s really revolutionary, for several reasons. Because Kindle has its own cell-phone-style network connection, you can get these updates anywhere there’s cell service (without paying data fees, which is nice). Kindle also has a 160 dpi electronic paper display that approximates the way printed paper looks. A portable device that wirelessly downloads articles each morning and displays them on a crisp paper-like screen? This is the device that’s going to save the newspaper industry from the Internet, right?
Well, not really. True, if you were debating about the newspapers vs. Internet a few years ago, someone might have proposed a device exactly like Kindle. (Like Kindle except for one detail: the hypothetical paper-saver would be supercheap, instead of $400 like Kindle.) But the Internet’s threat to the traditional newspaper business has evolved over time. For one thing, Kindle isn’t interactive. For another, there’s still the ad problem: if newspaper content on Kindle comes free, how are the newspapers getting making money? Will there be ads on Kindle?
Web sites are too deeply ingrained at this point for Kindle to get people back to reading the E-newspaper. Plus, unless there’s a very strong and aggressive ad system on Kindle, newspapers won’t be making much money either. Then there’s the ethical problems with Kindle: everything on Kindle belongs to Amazon and the content creators, not you, and you can’t lend Kindle books or articles to other Kindles. Amazon also makes it difficult to upload content to Kindle. Philosophically, Kindle (and other E-book readers) are a change for the worse in the way we think about writing, reading and intellectual property. Mark Pilgrim has assembled a nice collection of the different voices on this issue in The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts).
Kindle is already being referred to as the “the iPod of books,” and people will probably continue to refer to it as such. It’s best summed up by John Gruber:
You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion.
Doesn’t sound like a win to me
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“These Machines Kill Fascists” designed by You and Me, The Royal We
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ADA ad designed by Jeseok Yi
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where do I get trunks like that??
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Just saw a foursquare check-in to a church. I’m not sure God appreciates other people trying to...
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…the rhythms of the Old and New Testament, the...
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