We talk a lot about what it’s going to take to keep The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal and all the other papers of the world alive. We talk about the future of publishing books and magazines, and what it’s going to take to change the music industry. Let’s stop for a minute.
Generation B; People Magazine Still Has a Bikini Body | Michael Winerip, NYT, 24/5/09
EVERY week, the multimillion-dollar question for Larry Hackett, the editor of People magazine, is whom to put on the cover. ”The cover sells the magazine,” he said. ”The cover brings people into the big tent.”
Why journalists deserve low pay (Robert G. Picard, Christian Science Monitor, 19/5/09)
Journalists like to think of their work in moral or even sacred terms. With each new layoff or paper closing, they tell themselves that no business model could adequately compensate the holy work of enriching democratic society, speaking truth to power, and comforting the afflicted.
Por qué los periodistas merecen ganar poco (traducción del anterior en Soitu.es)
A los periodistas les gusta pensar en su trabajo en términos morales o incluso sagrados. Con cada nuevo recorte de personal o cierre de periódicos se dicen a sí mismos que no hay modelo de negocio que pueda compensar debidamente su sagrada labor de enriquecer la sociedad democrática, de hablarle alto y claro al poder y reconfortar a los afligidos. Continuar leyendo
Newspapers: Less Liked Than Airlines? (Jon Fine, FineOnMedia, Businesssweek.com, 19/5/09)
I posted here on Friday about a shred of good news for newspaper companies. Consumers appear to be willing to pay for their papers—that is, the paper version of the newspaper. Or, at least, they’re doing so in numbers sufficient to make most companies’ circulation revenues increase in the first few months of ‘09.So people are, like, ‘yay, newspapers,’ right? Not according to data just released by the American Customer Satisfaction Index.The American Customer Satisfaction Index–ACSI from here on down–tracks customer satisfaction across a wide range of industries and has done so since 1994. Each quarter it surveys consumers to come up with what they call a “satisfaction index” by assigning scores to key business sectors, and in many cases companies within these sectors, on a scale of 1 to 100.
Kicking Ink: The Struggles of a Print Newspaper Unsubscriber (Mark Glaser, MediaShift, 19/5/2009
I knew the day was coming, but it was still a shock when the day came. Groggy-eyed in the early morning light, I slowly went down the four flights of stairs in the front of my building and looked down. Nothing. For 18 generally uninterrupted years, I had the San Francisco Chronicle delivered to me, except when neighbors stole it. Today, there was nothing to steal.
Google Adds Search Options (Barbara Iverson, Poynter Online, 18/5/09)
El periódico es el héroe (Pedro J. Ramírez, El Mundo, Madrid, 17/5/09)
Siendo verdad, como escribe Gay Talese en las primeras líneas de El Reino y el Poder que «la mayoría de los periodistas son incansables voyeurs que le ven las verrugas al mundo» y que entre sus especialidades favoritas figuran «los países que se desmoronan y los barcos que se hunden», cualquiera diría que por primera vez nos toca mirarnos al ombligo por razones ajenas al narcisismo pues, si exceptuamos el sector porcino, nada parece tambalearse hoy alrededor con la brusquedad espasmódica del propio periodismo.
‘El futuro es el periodismo de siempre hecho de otra manera’ (Conferencia de Pedro J. Ramírez en la Universidad de Navarra, El Mundo, Madrid, 16/5/09)
El director de EL MUNDO, en el aula repleta de la Universidad de Navarra. | Iñaki Andrés
Old Growth Media And The Future Of News (Steven Berlin Johnson en South By Southwest Interactive Festival, Austin, 14/5/09)
I
If you happened to be hanging out in front of the old College Hill Bookstore in Providence Rhode Island in 1987, on the third week of every month you would have seen a skinny 19-year-old in baggy pants, sporting a vaguely Morrissey-like haircut, walking into the bookstore several times a day.
Umberto Eco cree que el hombre es el enemigo de los libros y no Internet (EFE, 13/5/09)
El escritor italiano Umberto Eco, uno de los intelectuales europeos de mayor prestigio, afirma que el principal enemigo de los libros no es Internet, sino el ser humano, que los censura y confina a bibliotecas inaccesibles.
The New York Times envisions version 2.0 of the newspaper (Zachary M Seward, Nieman Journalism Lab, 11/5/09)
The New York Times Co.’s research and development group has some of the best views in their midtown skyscraper — 24 floors above the newsrooms, higher even than the executives’ suites. Developers in the core R&D group — with titles like “lead creative technologist” and, my favorite, “futurist-in-residence” — are charged by the brass 14 floors below them with anticipating how news will next be consumed.