The New York Times is about to announce that it is starting a hyperlocal product called The Local working with our students at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism. PaidContent has the story early. So I’ll tell you about the school’s and my involvement and plans.
El proceso de integración de redacciones (Álvaro Liuzzi, Redacciones On Line, 28/2/09)
La integración de redacciones en el diario Clarín se anunció en marzo del año 2008. En principio se capacitó e informó al personal de como sería el proceso y en el mes de julio se integró el primer grupo de “periodistas digitales” conceptual y físicamente a la nueva y única redacción. Posteriormente se unieron dos grupos más en agosto y septiembre respectivamente.
Michael Wolff on Rupert Murdoch’s Worst Week Ever (Simon Dumenco, Advertising Age, 27/2/09)
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — I’ve known Michael Wolff since the summer of 1998, when I was an editor at New York magazine. I took him out to lunch after I assigned one of my writers, Jim Surowiecki (now of The New Yorker), to profile Michael upon the publication of his early web-boom-and-bust memoir, “Burn Rate.” It didn’t take me long to convince Michael that he should become New York’s media columnist; his very first column was about Rupert Murdoch.
Me lo tenía merecido (Pepe Eliaschev)
Reglas de William Randolf Hearst (San Simeon, 1938)
Outliers. Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t (Malcom Gladwell)
No, Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, makes no reference to newspapers or the media. It is all about how perhaps talent is slightly overrated, and is less important than, let’s say, luck, or influences of culture.
The inside-out agency (Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine, 23/2/09)
PR magnate Richard Edelman takes me to task for arguing in What Would Google Do? that PR people, like lawyers, can’t be Googlified. After saying nice things about the book, he adds: “But it is hard to love a book that assigns your profession to the scrap heap of history. Jarvis contends that lawyers and PR people cannot evolve their business models ‘because they have clients….’” He urges me to reconsider (or at least to separate PR from lawyers).
Google en Español (Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine, 21/2/09)
Ah, the web. A wonderful volunteer translated What Would Google Do? - The PowerPoint into Spanish. I’ll note, sadly, that the book itself hasn’t been sold into Spanish yet (damnit). But here’s the PPT:
Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers, Hello to a New Era of Corruption (Paul Starr, The New Republic, 4/3/09)
I. We take newspapers for granted. They have been so integral a part of daily life in America, so central to politics and culture and business, and so powerful and profitable in their own right, that it is easy to forget what a remarkable historical invention they are. Public goods are notoriously under-produced in the marketplace, and news is a public good–and yet, since the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers have produced news in abundance at a cheap price to readers and without need of direct subsidy. More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems. It is true that they have often failed to perform those functions as well as they should have done. But whether they can continue to perform them at all is now in doubt.
Eating my own dogfood (Jeff Jarvis, Buzz Machine, 19/2/09)
I’ve said before that there’s nobody better at analyzing the plight of newspapers than Alan Mutter. But Alan and I disagree about one thing: the likelihood that newspapers will be able to charge for their content online when their information—news—is quickly commodified and when there is no end of free competition. Mind you, I’ve never said that charging for content is bad. If you can charge, mazel tov! My argument is instead that charging is unlikely to succeed and talk of it lately is another unfortunate example of news executives grasping at straws rather than building the future. I’m writing my Guardian column right now about this game of whack-a-mole and Alan and I are set to debate the topic in the Australian press magazine Walkley.
The death of the news (Gary Kamiya, Salon.com, 17/2/09)
Journalism as we know it is in crisis. Daily newspapers are going out of business at an unprecedented rate, and the survivors are slashing their budgets. Thousands of reporters and editors have lost their jobs. No print publication is immune, including the mighty New York Times. As analyst Allan Mutter noted, 2008 was the worst year in history for newspaper publishers, with shares dropping a stunning 83 percent on average. Newspapers lost $64.5 billion in market value in 12 months.
Jornalismo Cultural (Daniel Piza)
É triste como cada livro sobre o tema ainda tem de bater naquela velha tecla “erudito x popular”, em uma época no qual esses adjetivos quase não tem mais razão de ser. Daniel Piza tem de abordar esse assunto, e o faz com êxito. Na página 45 de Jornalismo Cultural, cita uma pesquisa realizada pela Secretaria de Cultura de Belo Horizonte que incluiu entre suas perguntas: “Um filme de Steven Spielberg é cultura?”. Mais de dois terços dos entrevistados responderam “não”.
The local ad opportunity, and the danger of losing it (Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine, 16/2/09)
The promise of local ad support for news will come only if a new population of very small businesses can be served in new and effective ways - before Google beats everybody else to it. That’s apparent in the results of Webvisible and Nielsen surveys reported by MediaPost (via Marketeting Pilgrim and Frank Thinking), which show that local marketers are leaving newspapers and the yellow pages but are still dissatisfied with - and don’t pay enough attention to - internet marketing. Factoids: Continuar leyendo
How Google Is Making Us Smarter (Carl Zimmer, Discover, 15/2/09)
Our minds are under attack. At least that’s what I keep hearing these days. Thumbing away at our text messages, we are becoming illiterate. (Or is that illiter8?) Blogs make us coarse, YouTube makes us shallow. Last summer the cover of The Atlantic posed a question: “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” Inside the magazine, author Nicholas Carr argued that the Internet is damaging our brains, robbing us of our memories and deep thoughts. “As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world,” he wrote, “it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”
A guide to the 100 best blogs - part I (Bryan Appleyard, The Sunday Times, Londres, 15/2/09)
Blogs — an ugly word, but now unavoidable — were born with the internet. As soon as people started to use the technology that would link computers, they started leaving messages. In the 1980s, these were “pinned” on virtual “bulletin boards”. Then, in the early 1990s, online diaries appeared, personal journals to be seen by the entire online world. As internet use spread, people were dazzled by their power to connect and communicate. But they didn’t just want to stare at pages. They wanted, above all, to make their mark on the explosively expanding world of cyberspace. So, in the mid-1990s, the online diary became the web log, or blog.
A Nonprofit Panacea For Newspapers? (David Folkenflik, segunda de dos partes sobre periódicos sin fines de lucro, NPR, 11/1/09)
Morning Edition, February 6, 2009 · As the business model for newspapers cracks apart, there are those who are lamenting and those who are inventing. Some journalists now say the industry should forget about making a profit altogether and find new ways to support the news.
Forget Micropayments — Here’s a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content (Steve Outing, E&P, 10/2/09)
You’re not listening, I can tell. Many people in the newspaper industry are already in full-fledged panic mode, and one of the recent responses has been a wave of calls to resurrect an online publishing business model that has not yet worked: micropayments.
Paying for the news: A link-a-thon (Mathew Wingram, 10/2/09)
Newsweek Plans Makeover to Fit a Smaller Audience (Richard Pérez-Peña, NYTimes, 8/2/09)
If a similar episode happens six months from now, editors say, Newsweek probably will not even bother.