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:
- Obama appoints YouTube (Google) as Secretary of Video | CNET News — “[W]hy should the incoming President, or public official, favor one Internet video service over another? Yahoo, MSN, Blip, Veoh and other video sharing sites shouldn’t have to lobby the White House for equal time or at least some time. I am sure the choice of YouTube was practical, and has nothing to do with Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s very public support of Obama.
Implicit product endorsements are difficult to avoid for any public official. If Obama prefers a Blackberry, Apple can’t do much to fix that problem. But, Obama is rarely seen in pictures with his Blackberry and the New York Times reports that he is going to have to give up his favorite communications device.
In the case of uploading video, the Obama team can create its own branded, video-sharing service neutral video player that allows anyone in the world to embed the content. That might be a more equitable way for President Obama to spread his message, and he could still have a YouTube channel.” - Peter Preston: Tabloids must be free to offend | The Guardian — ‘If mass-circulation newspapers, which also devote considerable space to reporting and analysis of public affairs, don’t have the freedom to write about scandal, I doubt whether they will retain their mass circulations — with obvious and worrying implications for the democratic process,’ he told the Society of Editors.
It’s a case you can put in different ways. ‘To keep this squalid industry afloat, unrestricted right to publicise the sex lives of others is necessary, so the judiciary must be silenced’
- How Industries Survive Change. If They Do. | NYTimes.com — “[P]erhaps the destruction will lead to more creativity. Perhaps the people we now know as journalists — or, for that matter, autoworkers — will find ways to innovate elsewhere, just as, over a century ago, gun makers laid down their weapons and broke out the needle and thread. That is, after all, the American creative legacy: making innovation seem as easy as, well, riding a bike.”
- The Shallowest Generation | The Big Picture — “It is time to cast aside the $88,000 Range Rovers, $1,200 Jimmy Choo boots, $5,000 Rolex watches and daily double lattes at Starbucks. It is time to live within your means, distinguish between needs and wants, reduce debt, save 10% of your income, make sure your kids get a good education, not try and keep up with the Jones’, show compassion for your fellow man, and possibly pay more taxes and get less benefits, for the good of the country.”
- The Wisdom of Geeks, The Madness of Crowds | Harvard Business Blog — “Silver has, I believe, discovered a good method for political prediction. You start with polls, which are now both frequent and widely-dispersed across the land. You take a bunch of them, correct for biases of various types (e.g., consistent lean right or left, or pollsters that don’t call mobile phones), and then run a Monte Carlo simulation on the outcome to see what the probabilities and confidence intervals are. As you can see if you look on the website, it results in a massive amount of data, but it seems to work.”
- We can be heroes … | FT.com — “Monck notes that in journalistic practice “moral issues barely get raised at all”. He believes more in the need for journalism to reveal and explain; he wants contempt laws liberalised and the secret services to be more open, so that we might better understand what is at stake in the war on terror. If journalism is in crisis, some of the components of that crisis are as old as journalism itself and are indivisible from it. In this accessible, jauntily written book, Monck ends up certain that we need journalism but sees it, with affection and exasperation, as a flawed thing, which, when it does good, does so by accident.”
