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:
- Lebedev: downturn has halted expansion | The Guardian — Don’t you love a mogul who knows his Roman history? “My personal consumption is very limited. I’m taught to be more Marcus Aurelius than Caracalla if you know your Roman history,” he said.
- How to Save Your Newspaper | TIME — One of history’s ironies is that hypertext — an embedded Web link that refers you to another page or site — had been invented by Ted Nelson in the early 1960s with the goal of enabling micropayments for content. He wanted to make sure that the people who created good stuff got rewarded for it. In his vision, all links on a page would facilitate the accrual of small, automatic payments for whatever content was accessed. Instead, the Web got caught up in the ethos that information wants to be free. Others smarter than we were had avoided that trap. For example, when Bill Gates noticed in 1976 that hobbyists were freely sharing Altair BASIC, a code he and his colleagues had written, he sent an open letter to members of the Homebrew Computer Club telling them to stop. “One thing you do is prevent good software from being written,” he railed. “Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?”
- Obama, as News Media Critic, Concurs with Tyndall Report | Andrew Tyndall — A nonsensical question by ABC’s Gibson–although not as glaringly flawed as Couric’s–betrayed his lack of attention to the very Economics 101 tutorials that his business correspondent Betsy Stark taught us here and here last week. “There is a lot of people who have said it is a spending bill and not a stimulus,” Gibson inquired. Yet, by definition, a demand-side fiscal stimulus of a recessionary economy consists of deficit-financed government spending. Charlie! Pay attention to Betsy!
- PR treats journalists not as resources, but like car companies treat suppliers | Charles Arthur — [I]f you wonder, as a journalist, why it is that you get people who seem to have no idea what you do or why you even exist, but do seem to think it’s terribly important that you received some email or other, think of it like this: you’re the company that makes wing mirrors, and the car manufacturer wants to make sure you received its order that it sent the other day.
The fact that the order was for 5,000 rear-view mirrors — well, that’s just how the world is sometimes.
- The Problem with The Boy in the Striped Pajamas | Opinio Juris — The Boy in the Striped Pajamas … partakes of the same logic of identification that corrupts movies like Schindler’s List: we certainly don’t want the Jewish boy to die, but we really don’t want the German boy to die, because he has done nothing to deserve his fate – the sins of the father should not be visited upon his son.
The problem with that, of course, is that no one deserved to die in the gas chamber – not the German boy, not the Jewish boy, and certainly not the other Jewish prisoners. The movie thus does both the viewer and the Holocaust a great disservice by forcing us, via its narrative structure, to identify with the German boy. Innocence does not admit degrees.
- Can Google save news by sharing the wealth? | Kirk Lapointe — [T]he precedent of Google’s recent settlement on the publishing frontier suggests there is some currency in Osnos’ argument, so the time ahead will be interesting if the news business decides to jostle more seriously and not just mutter its disapproval.