These are some of the things that have caught my attention lately. It’s a more eclectic mix than just the news business, but then so’s life:
- Lower your newspaper expectations — now — “Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thomson responded to the question of whether newspapers should be run as non-profit entities to help them survive:
“I think it’s fair to say that a lot of newspapers already were not for profit.””
- THE LAST QE2 TRANSATLANTIC CROSSING — In which Juan has an idea and gets his reward not from newspapers but direct: “Cunard liked my blog very much and one day I got a phone call phone from my travel agent with the BIG NEWS.
From a very cheap cabin we were upgraded to a Q2 suite in the top of the ship!”
- Ally Palmer Interview: Smaller newspapers have to be smarter | Garcia blog — “There’s no doubt that we’re working in an industry which is, for the most part, managing decline, but there’s also no doubt that print still has a place in the modern media landscape. We are seeing newspapers produced by fewer and fewer journalists, which is worrying — but small can sometimes be better.”
- Tribune’s Lee Abrams: ‘Some People Didn’t Get It, and They’re Gone’ | Jeff Bercovici — “There was a big myth that you could not have these [newsroom] cuts that were going through and still produce a quality newspaper, and that’s just nonsense.…We’ve been through some pretty substantial cuts, and there were people who thought, “No, it’s going to be horrible, you just can’t do it, it’s going to be dumbed down.” And no, it just had to be rethought. It’s just as intelligent and engaging as ever, just with fewer people.”
- Goldman Sachs to Newspapers: We See Signs of Life | E&P — “Goldman believes it may take another five years for online revenue to to fully offset declines in print.” Really.
- Open Knowledge Foundation Wiki — , from socio-economic data to legal material. Recent technologies allow this information to be explored, built upon and made accessible in new ways — whether through visual representation, semantic interlinking, or through social media applications.
This informal, hands-on workshop will bring government information experts together with those who are interested in finding and re-using government information. In addition to focused discussions about legal and technological aspects of re-use, government information assets will be documented and tagged on CKAN, a registry of knowledge resources. - Media facing ‘carnage’, warns Guardian News & Media’s Emily Bell | guardian.co.uk — “We are on the brink of two years of carnage for western media. In the UK, five nationals could go out of business and we could be left with no UK-owned broadcaster outside of the BBC,” she said last night.
- Why public ownership is a failed model | FT.com — Now he tells us: “I have served on the boards of various public companies for more than 20 years and most such constructs were dysfunctional. Interests were not aligned and there was more focus on pointless, ritual corporate activity than underlying profitability and productivity. Everyone tries hard, but the disconnect between management and ultimate ownership leads to the profound issues our economy now faces.”
- Some words on the future from my 5th anniversary address | mySociety — “[W]e know from the continued influence of newspapers, some born in the 19th century, that political media needs longevity to gain the reach and legitimacy required to transform whole systems and to challenge the expectations of whole populations. mySociety needs to work out how to be here not just in 6 months, but in 20 years.”
- Credit crunch: how we responded | Dadblog — “News Aggregators are a growth industry (well, duh). Google News dominates (well, duh). But NewsNow still gets 23 per cent of this traffic (well…oh, actually, that’s quite interesting). Money fact: news aggregators only send 27 percent of their traffic on to news sites. The biggest beneficiary of news aggregator referrals is…. Google.”
- Not a Great Depression, a Great Rebalancing | Umair Haque — “To rebalance the value equation of debt and equity, our challenge is to build a financial system where equity can also add value to corporations, instead of being simply a burdensome tax managers reluctantly pay to access capital. To do that, we have to reduce and reverse the costs that make equity relatively unattractive in the first place.
That means better mechanisms for managers to communicate information to markets. Why do we rely on heavily footnoted reports issued once a year in a world moving at lightspeed? When Yahoo finance chatrooms regularly move markets, it’s a clear signal that the informational interface between managers and markets is in a state of terminal obsolescence.”
- Post-Meltdown Mythologies (I): Americans Have Been Living Beyond Their Means | Robert Reich — “Since the year 2000, median family income has been dropping, adjusted for inflation. One of the main reasons the typical family has taken on more debt has been to maintain its living standards in the face of these declining real incomes.
It’s not as if the typical family suddenly went on a spending binge — buying yachts and fancy cars and taking ocean cruises. No, the typical family just tried to keep going as it had before. But with real incomes dropping, and the costs of necessities like gas, heating oil, food, health insurance, and even college tuitions all soaring, the only way to keep going as before was to borrow more. You might see this as a moral failure, but I think it’s more accurate to view it as an ongoing struggle to stay afloat when the boat’s sinking.”
- How Come British Financial Journalism Is Such a Hit In The US? — “Through this year the Economist has seen its ad pages grow 5.9% attracting 69 new advertisers. Compare those ad pages to Forbes Magazine where they are not only down 18.5% but now the Economist is leading it by 12 pages on the year. In the more general news weekly field the Economist ad page account is well ahead of Time Magazine that has seen a 21% fall this year.
On the circulation front, however, the Economist still has a long way to go. Time, Newsweek and US News & World Report together have just under 8 million circulation whereas at the Economist it is around 750,000. But that is still around a 50% increase over the past five years – not bad considering this was the time of declining circulations for so many magazines.” - The revolution of paperless paper | BBC NEWS — “At Plastic Logic’s factory in Dresden, British engineer Dean Baker shows me a new kind of newspaper.
What’s new about it? Well, for a start there’s no paper — it’s electronic.
The device looks just like a table mat, it’s as light as a magazine.
But onto it you can download hundreds of newspapers and — at the touch of a button — browse through them quite safely, without elbowing anyone ever again.”
