Twilight of the American newspaper | Richard Rodriguez, Harper’s Magazine, noviembre 2009
A scholar I know, a woman who is ninety-six years old, grew up in a tin shack on the American prairie, near the Canadian border. She learned to read from the pages of the Chicago Tribune in a one-room schoolhouse. Her teacher, who had no more than an eighth-grade education, had once been to Chicago—had been to the opera! Women in Chicago went to the opera with bare shoulders and long gloves, the teacher imparted to her pupils. Because the teacher had once been to Chicago, she subscribed to the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune, which came on the train by Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest.
Rupert has balls | Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine, 27/11/09
Tweet: Rupert has balls. Well, he used to.
That’s the essence of Murdoch: balls. It’s the essence of the culture of News Corp., which I learned from working there (at TV Guide): Australian macho seat-of-the-pants instant decision making.
Online first? Four ways to show you mean it | Michele McLellan, Knight Digital Media Center, 24/11/09
Recent flare ups over the merger of The Washington Post’s print and online newsrooms leave out critical requirements for newsroom leaders who want their staffs to innovate online
Murdoch madness | Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine, 23/11/09
I’ve had a fair number of press calls on the Murdoch/Bing sillliness and here are the points I’ve been making:
How to lose an argument online | Seth Godin, Seth’s Blog, 23/11/09
- Have an argument. Once you start an argument, not a discussion, you’ve already lost. Think about it: have you ever changed your mind because someone online started yelling at you? They might get you to shut up, but it’s unlikely they’ve actually changed your opinion.
- Forget the pitfalls of Godwin’s law. Any time you mention Hitler or even Communist China or Bill O’Reilly, you’ve lost.
- Use faulty analogies. If someone is trying to make a point about, say, health care, try to make an analogy to something conceptually unrelated, like the space shuttle program, and you’ve lost.
- Question motives. The best way to get someone annoyed and then have them ignore you is to bypass any thoughtful discussion of facts and instead question what’s in it for the person on the other end. Make assumptions about their motivations and lose their respect.
- Act anonymously. What are the chances that heckled comments from the bleachers will have an impact?
- Threaten to take action in another venue. Insist that this will come back to haunt the other person. Guarantee you will spread the word or stop purchasing.
- Bring up the slippery slope. Actually, the slope isn’t that slippery. People don’t end up marrying dogs, becoming cannibals or harvesting organs because of changes in organization, technology or law.
- Go to the edges. This is a variant of the slippery slope, in which you bring up extremes at either end of whatever spectrum is being discussed.
Has the WaPo chosen paper over web? | Mathe Wingram, mathewingram.com/work, 22/11/09
The recent cuts at the Washington Post — as reported by Politico and Washington’s City Paper — have once again brought to the surface a culture clash that has been going on in mainstream newsrooms for most of the last decade, and one that shows no sign of ending any time soon. If anything, the economic upheaval and advertising-revenue tsunami that has hit the media industry over the past year or so has amplified it. It’s the clash between print-heads and Web-heads, or “real” journalists (as some choose to call them) and the “web-first” crowd, and the fear expressed by some — including former WaPo online staffer Derek Willis and former online executive editor Jim Brady — is that the printies are gaining the upper hand.
The games newspapers play | Mark Hamilton, Notes from a Teacher, 22/11/09
It’s no secret that newspaper circulation is in long-term decline.
It’s also no secret, at least within the business, that newspaper auditing organizations have made a number of moves over the years to: (a) more accurately reflect how many people are buying newspapers (their version); or (b) cover the fact that the decline is continuing (a more commonsense view).
Periodismo y plusvalía | Eliseo Verón, Perfil, 21/11/09
El domingo pasado, Roberto Guareschi presentó y analizó en este mismo diario, bajo el título “¿Pero roban o no roban?”, una discusión que tuvo lugar en el Monaco Media Forum y que reunió a Mathias Döpfner (CEO de Axel Springer) y a Arianna Huffington, cofundadora y editora jefa del The Huffington Post, uno de los más destacados sitios actuales de periodismo digital. La moderadora del panel fue Christine Ockrent, una de las más famosas periodistas de la televisión francesa, presentadora estrella, en los años ochenta, de uno de los noticiarios de la noche. En su introducción, Christine Ockrent dijo que se iba a discutir sobre contenidos, sobre las noticias, “probablemente uno de los contenidos cuya producción es más costosa, y altamente perecedera”. La flecha indicando el centro de la discusión estaba trazada: los medios del periodismo tradicional (gráfico o televisivo) enfrentan altos costos de producción, mientras que el periodismo digital produce poco o nada, y se limita a “levantar” noticias de múltiples fuentes. Durante el debate, Döpfner señalará que el gran error de los diarios ha sido dar acceso gratis a sus contenidos.
Walt Disney vs. the news industry: How bad management is killing newspapers and their websites | Robert Niles, OJR, 20/11/09
I’ve attended many journalism conferences over the years, but our industry offers nothing like the event I attended this week. As many of you might know, my primary job these days is running a theme park news website that I founded nearly a decade ago. So this week I drove up to Las Vegas for the theme park industry’s largest annual event, the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions’ Expo.
What does this have to do with journalism, you ask? Nothing.
Don’t Give Up on Online Video Yet | Regina McCombs, Poynter Online, 18/11/09
Poor video. For a while, he was the hot boyfriend of the online world. His buddy, pre-roll advertising, was touted as the way to save the industry. Now, like a guy who dumped us, people are trashing-talking video content on news sites and telling all their girlfriends that video on the Web fails to perform.
Murdoch Warns That Without eTablets, “Newspapers will go out of Business” | Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch, 17/11/09
Old habits die hard. Rupert Murdoch believes that the future of the newspaper business is subscriptions—electronic subscriptions. He’s done with giving away his news for free on the Web and to search engines like Google. Instead thinks that Kindle-like tablet computers can save the media industry. It’s a notion that’s been floated before: an entire newsstand in a color tablet
which delivers electronic versions of any newspaper or magazine you want for a monthly subscription of $15 to $19 a month.
Are newspapers still relevant? | Heribert Prantl, 12/11/09
El futuro del negocio está en los ecosistemas | traducción del anterior
La semana pasada dije que el futuro de las noticias es empresarial (no institucional). Hoy continúo: El futuro del negocio está en los ecosistemas (no en los conglomerados o las industrias).
The future of business is in ecosystems | Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine, 11/11/09
Last week, I said that the future of news is entrepreneurial (not institutional). Today, a sequel: The future of business is in ecosystems (not conglomerates or industries).
Comprender los medios de comunicacióm. Las extensiones del ser humano, por Marshall McLuhan | Mili Cornejo, eBlog, 9/11/09
A principios de los años 60, Marshall McLuhan analizó los medios de comunicación partiendo de la idea de que todo medio tecnológico es una prolongación de alguna facultad humana, psíquica o física: la rueda, por ejemplo, una prolongación del pie; el libro, una prolongación del ojo; la ropa, una prolongación de la piel; etc.
What does a jobs crisis mean for journalism education? | Dina Rickman, Journalism.co.uk, 6/11/09
Future journalists should be informed of the ‘jobs crisis’ within journalism, said Adrian Monck, the former head of Journalism at City University, at the ‘Is World Journalism in Crisis?’ conference last month.
Five factors that foster innovation in the online newsroom | Steen Steensen, Online Journalism Blog, 5/11/09
I recently heard a newspaper chief editor say something quite shocking. I attended a meeting arranged by the Norwegian consortium New Media Network where the chief editor of the second biggest national tabloid in Norway, Dagbladet, was to give a speech. And believe it or not, chief editor of Dagbladet, Anne Aasheim, said: “I have been a media executive for 20 years now and I must say; it’s more fun today than ever before!”
Ken Auletta: Google Is Not Trying to Harm Old Media | Patrick Phillips, I Want Media, 3/11/09
Ken Auletta, the longtime media columnist for The New Yorker, explores “the roiling crosscurrents of the new media terrain” in his new book, “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It,” published this week.