"Self expression is the new entertainment, We never used to question why people sit on the couch for seven hours a day watching bad TV. Nobody ever asked, 'Why are they doing that for free?' We need to celebrate [this desire to contribute for free] rather than question it."
most of the 40,000 or so journalists writing for daily newspapers most of the time are producing work that is routine and, more often than one would like, trivial. On the whole, so far as I can judge, journalism before the late 1960s was generally superficial, often servile, usually unambitious, narrowly focused on government, almost devoid of critical inquiry about business, inattentive to the professions, the universities, the environment, women, minorities, schools, the family. If there was a golden age of American journalism, it began around 1965-70 and lasted for a generation.
Democracy requires at least three things: (1) Important decisions are made in the open. (2) The public and its representatives have an opportunity to debate them, so the decisions can be revised in light of what the public discovers and wants. And (3) those who make the big decisions are accountable to voters.
the best feature is iBooks, the e-book reading software that knocks Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader into a cocked hat.says the Telegraph
Novels are beautifully presented, lined up on a virtual bookshelf, complete with sleeve art.
The pages of the books resemble proper printed pages, with a sense of texture and authenticity to them. Turning pages is achieved with a swiping gesture, or a single tap in the right-hand margins.
The iPad would help "attract millions of new readers to the world's best books", said John Makinson, chairman of the Penguin Group.
publishers have agreed to a business model that gives them more power over the price that customers pay for e-books.
PCs will be around as expert devices for the long haul, but it's clear that Apple, coasting on the deserved success of the iPhone, sees simple, closed internet devices as the future of computing. (Or at the very least, portable computing.) And for the average consumer, it could be.reports Gizmodo
It's certainly no savior for newspapers. What are you going to do, kill your website and sell your "publication" in the App Store? Nonsense. The iPad doesn't change the economic equation. You aren't prevented from selling your content by lack of technology and tools; you're prevented by a lack of market demand. And the demand isn't there because people have, at their fingertips, far more alternatives than the human brain can process -
I have achieved the Marxist ideal. I own the means of production and distribution. I have job security, I can't be fired and do much better than many journalists."
By reducing the barrier to entry for new publishers to almost zero, it has vastly increased the number of competitors reaching any given publisher's audience.That's why we have to find new production models that work.
The most important thing to consider is the sustainabilty aspect.
We need in 2010 to discover a business model which will produce profitabilty to fund hyperlocal projects outside of the "let's see if we can get funding model"
Personally I think that it will involve a variety of revenue streams and partnerships as well as sharing of resources.
The idea of a portable device for reading newspapers and magazines has been kicking around for nearly two decades, dating back to concepts promulgated by erstwhile Knight Ridder new media/tablet guru Roger Fidler (who's still chasing his dream).
the tablet will add is location-awareness, giving publishers and advertisers the ability to tune their messages to where the user is.
A portable magazine reader is important only if it greatly exploits the ability for interactivity that will finally make magazines (if they're smart) tap into the vital special-interest communities that are their subscriber bases.
it will provide much more value. If you're going to carry a book reader, wouldn't you rather it be one that does tons of other things?
This is where things start to get really interesting. The tablet could finally bring the long-dreamed-of "TV everywhere" concept to life, with a portable device that provides a la carte access to all sorts of video content
some of the best reporters and the most insightful commentary will come from fewer and fewer sources. But these reporters will have national reputations, and those reputations will be well-financed both from media itself and also from books and speaking engagement
“More and more, as the media tries to survive financially, it is trying to seek out the lowest common denominator and find what people’s biases are and then appeal to them, and I found that distressing.”
I was getting information quicker on my couch in south Dublin than the reporter in her hotel room.”from which came
Look around an airport lounge now. You'll see more people looking at their phones than holding newspapers.
An innovation doesn't have to be perfect to launch; in fact the cost of pursuing perfection can doom a project to failure. "Good enough" performance along traditional lines is sufficient for launch, if it is providing a distinct advantage over existing products in some new approach.
personal branding is a lifestyle, managing micro communities is second nature and developing areas of specialist knowledge is essential for survival in what is a freelance work sphere where multiple revenue streams as a sole trader are the norm.
offering universal wifi could present a real opportunity for publishers to recapture some of the qualities that made their print products so successful.
would allow publishers to re-establish a stronger negotiating position when it comes to selling local advertising
AOL’s new high-tech method of mass-producing news and other online content raises some interesting questions.writes Lisa Anderson over at CJR.
Who needs editors and journalists to come up with compelling story ideas when there is AOL’s “new digital-newsroom system that uses a series of algorithms to predict the types of stories, videos and photos that will be most popular with consumers and marketers”?
a magnet for both advertisers and consumers by turning it into the top creator of digital content.
Once the consumer mind has been tapped, AOL editors will assign articles to a cyber army of over 3,000 freelancers around the country—a number it plans to grow through a new Web site for contributors called Seed.
transform from the crowd and into a specialized, organized collaborative group of people that banded together to report on vagaries of government and the elite.
News consumers are mainly interested in news coverage, not content. Coverage is a service that promises to keep its users "in the loop" about what is relevant to them and their peer groups. It is delivered by selecting content on readers' behalf – i.e. through aggregation and curation – and while it relies on content it is more than that. Because it is an ongoing, day-to-day service, coverage is all about loyalty: once consumers find a provider they like, they come back to it. And because of hyperlinks, in the web coverage providers need not be content providers (and vice-versa). This means that media brands' power – including their pricing power – will increasingly be a matter of how well they aggregate content – whatever its source – and not just how good their content is.
the engine is the content, the car the aggregation, and the engineer the journalistand adds that
Tim Berners Lee's invention of the hyperlink created the perfect frictionless interface between two formerly integrated industries: publishing and aggregation. It does not matter that this did not come about in the gradual way that Christensen describes (i.e. through a slow process of industry evolution) but as a quantum leap, before the industry was ready
The crisis in accountability in recent years has become all the more acute as the number of operating nonprofits has grown enormously and the sector has assumed even greater responsibility for society’s well being. Public expectations are greater than ever. Public confidence in their performance and integrity is, of course, the key to nonprofits’ ability to raise money. While most nonprofits are honest and transparent, the small number that are not can stain the reputation of the entire field. That is why there must be oversight mechanisms to ensure that both nonprofit organizations and philanthropic foundations operate ethically and effectively. The loss of daily newspapers and the investigative journalism they have traditionally provided will make this task much more difficult.
Decided that big is bust; that the future of news will be 'small, but perfectly formed'. Now just got to write a blog post to match...
‘An ad network that extracts the minimum commission it can afford out of ad sales for member sites will grow larger because more sites will join this network than its greedier competitors.
‘Ad networks need a critical mass of audience before they can sell to top-tier advertisers, which pay higher rates. So charging less commission to grow larger can yield more ad sales at better prices…
Evslin’s Law in its editorial form would take us; to that hyper-local community that meets and mingles at the school gates every afternoon. In nigh on each and every postcode in this country.and he adds
That’s where you draw your line; build your network from… You work from the very bottom up; not hope to find an answer that is imposed from the top down.
You start at the very bottom; with a basic molecule of editorial life and then build our new, journalistic platforms from there.
1. Platforms. There’s tremendous benefit in building a platform and the more people use to succeed, the more the platform succeeds. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay – you know all the examples.
2. Entrepreneurial enterprises. Thanks to the platforms, it’s incredibly inexpensive to start new companies. It’s also a helluva lot cheaper to fail (and try again). This is why I believe that the future of news – and many other industries – is entrepreneurial: because it can be. It’s not just media and its bits. It’s manufacturing (because you can use others’ factories and distribution channels and your own customers as your platforms).
3. Networks. It is still necessary to gather the smalls together into bigs: audience brought together so advertisers can buy access to them more easily; purchasing brought together to get better prices. So there is business in creating and serving these networks.
