I know I do it, but there’s a mildly annoying habit in writing of ‘naming and claiming’. Something teetering on the precipice of ‘the bleeding obvious’ is headlined and wrapped up and presented as a novelty. I call this habit the Monck Method.
I was reminded of it re-reading Nick Carr’s piece on unbundling content from advertising in newspapers, published a few months ago. Here it is: Continue reading
The Columbia Journalism Review takes on a familiar trope — the scarcity of attention — and riffs on it in relation to journalism.
Attention—our most precious resource—is in increasingly short supply. To win the war for our attention, news organizations must make themselves indispensable by producing journalism that helps make sense of the flood of information that inundates us all.
Attention, with respect to Herbert Simon, is not scarce. It is a constant.
It’s just managed in ways that readers of the Columbia Journalism Review may find disappointing. Continue reading