Category Archives: News business

The Magnificent Folly of Great American News Reporting

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The charge of the Light BrigadeI don’t know John Crewd­son, but I’m sorry he’s out of a job. He’s the sub­ject of this post at the Chicago Reader:

The Nobel Prize in medi­cine was awar­ded last month to Luc Montag­nier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi of the Pas­teur Insti­tute in Paris for dis­cov­er­ing the HIV virus in 1983 — but not to the Amer­ican sci­ent­ist Robert Gallo.

This res­ult might be inter­preted as the ulti­mate vin­dic­a­tion of reporter John Crewd­son, who in 1988, in a 50,000-word story in the Chicago Tribune, argued that Gallo — cred­ited back then with codis­cov­er­ing the virus — had merely redis­covered Montagnier’s virus, which had been sent to Gallo as a pro­fes­sional cour­tesy. Con­tinue read­ing →

Rupert Murdoch on the future of newspapers

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Here is an edited ver­sion of Rupert Mur­doch’s Boyer lec­ture — The Future of News­pa­pers: Mov­ing Bey­ond Dead Trees. One word sum­mary? Brands.

But here it is:

Too many journ­al­ists seem to take a per­verse pleas­ure in rumin­at­ing on their pending demise. I know indus­tries that are today facing stiff new com­pet­i­tion from the inter­net: banks, retail­ers, phone com­pan­ies and so on. But these sec­tors also see the inter­net as an extraordin­ary oppor­tun­ity. But among our journ­al­istic friends are some mis­guided cyn­ics who are too busy writ­ing their own obit­u­ary to be excited by the oppor­tun­ity. Con­tinue read­ing →

Saving journalism, one summit at a time

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World Economic Forum Summit on the Global AgendaLike Jeff Jar­vis, I too was in Dubai for the World Eco­nomic Forum’s inaug­ural Sum­mit on the Global Agenda. Charlie Beck­ett (whose upsum­mer is here) and I were in the Future of Media group. So what was our dia­gnosis of the state of journalism?

Well, here it is. We did talk about cen­sor­ship and val­ues — but remem­ber what Oscar Wilde said about a camel being a horse designed by a com­mit­tee: Con­tinue read­ing →

What would Jeff do?

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In case you hap­pen to be a journ­al­ist and Jeff Jar­vis still has you think­ing that news­pa­per prob­lems are your fault, take a look at the New York Times from July, 1980 (and if you like catchy head­lines, they don’t come much catch­ier than this):

First U.S. Exper­i­ments in Elec­tronic News­pa­pers Begin in Two Com­munit­ies; 13 News­pa­pers to Be Added The Need for News­pa­pers A Com­mu­nic­a­tions Devel­op­ment Tele­phone, Cable and Air­waves A Warn­ing on Reg­u­la­tion [pay access]. Con­tinue read­ing →

The return of content (subscription not included)

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FT logoAbout twenty years ago, I went to a farewell din­ner for a young man who was leav­ing the UK to head for Korea. As a news action junkie, I was baffled. The Soviet Empire was in crisis. The Middle East in tur­moil. And this guy was going to Seoul for the Fin­an­cial Times?

Still, gnaw­ing away was the sus­pi­cion that maybe he knew some­thing the rest of us didn’t. That linger­ing sus­pi­cion from twenty years ago was prob­ably right.

John Rid­ding is now the FT’s CEO and here’s his take on what ‘mar­ket melt­down’ has done for the paper brand (as told to Robert Mac­Mil­lan at Reu­ters):

“What [the crisis] is doing for our read­er­ship and audi­ence is pretty remark­able. I think it really under­lines this idea that at a time of tur­moil, people really do need trus­ted guides, and are pre­pared to pay.”

Con­tinue read­ing →