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:
- Never let it be said news must be “new” | Charles Arthur — “‘[N]ews is what the reader doesn’t yet know, but you can persuade them they want to’. Doesn’t matter if it’s ten minutes, ten days or ten years (even ten decades) old. Look at how the Sunday Times held its George Osborne/Mandelson/yacht story for weeks, waiting for the right angle — or time — to come along.
It’s easy to forget that it’s not always about getting the news to people instantly. If the Ross/Brand story had gone onto the Mail’s site on the Saturday evening after it went out, what could it have written? “Comic makes offensive joke”? Sometimes these things need to stew a bit. News is sometimes instant. But sometimes, it tastes better cooked slow.
Which isn’t an argument for not then getting it up on your website and telling the world about it. Only for not mistaking instantaneity with impact.”
- Too little, too late | FT.com — “The decision to use the offensive content is a serious concern. Either the editorial policy guidelines are not robust enough; or they were followed by producers considering the views of the self-selecting audience for the programme rather than those of licence fee payers in general; or they were not followed. Something needs to change.
The bigger question is why a public service broadcaster, with a mission to differ from commercial media, was dealing with this rubbish at all.”
- Netscape co-founder: shut off the print edition right now | forum4editors — “Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offense. You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business—shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defense and into playing offense, its future was secure. The newspaper companies have to do exactly the same thing.
The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy.”
- Shock: Drudge loses his grip on US media! | FT.com — “Just as Fleet Street swings left and right politically, depending on where it sees its commercial advantage, the US media have shifted left for a time, to mimic what they judge to be the country’s mood. When that mood swings back, so will the media.
In principle, the Republicans should appreciate this, for it is a triumph of the market over monopoly control. Or, as the Drudge Report might put it: ‘MEDIA ATTACK THEMSELVES! … DEVELOPING.’”
- Marc Andreessen Q & A | Portfolio.com — “[Qik] will turn every phone that contains a camera into a source of streaming video and audio [which works better in a faster browser like Chrome]. Anybody can watch live, and then it can all get recorded. It’s almost the reverse of George Orwell. In 1984, the government had cameras mounted everywhere. In a Qik-based world, it’s the exact opposite. Literally, everybody on the planet is going to be streaming video.
Qik raises some issues, like what if 10,000 people at a concert all broadcast the show live?
About a year ago, we went to see one of the major sports leagues—I won’t mention which one. We presented how they can have social networks and users can post videos shot at games and photos and all this stuff. And the main topic of conversation was how they could prevent people from recording video with their mobile phones and posting it online.” - Circulation: Worse than you think | Reflections of a Newsosaur — “While newspaper circulation has weakened since the 1980s, the decay has accelerated sharply since 2003. Sunday circulation, which had been relatively more resilient than daily sales, now is falling more precipitously than daily sales.
Today’s daily circulation is back to where it was in 1945 and the Sunday sale is where it was in 1965.
Though circulation is at pre-Baby Boom levels, the U.S. population has more than doubled since the mid-1940s. If you divide circulation by population, you will find that fewer than 18 out of 100 Americans today buy a daily or Sunday newspaper.”
