Tag Archives: Google Inc.

Democracy and the media go together like…

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Ditchley ParkLike Jeff Jar­vis, Charlie Beck­ett, and Richard Sam­brook, I too was at Ditch­ley recently for a con­fer­ence on the media and demo­cracy. Present com­pany excep­ted, it brought together a fas­cin­at­ing and lively group of people (not always the case at conferences).

Sir Jeremy Green­stock, formerly Britain’s man at the UN and in Iraq (and someone who speaks in per­fect para­graphs), gives his impres­sions below (bold, ital­ics, and broken paras are me).

For the record, I’m more pess­im­istic about demo­cracy than about journ­al­ism — but I also think Google — the acci­dental mono­pol­ist — should step up to the plate and fund some inde­pend­ent con­tent resource (listen — that’s the sound of me not hold­ing my breath). Con­tinue read­ing →

Microsoft to Newspapers: You made information free. For Google.

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UK Association of Online Publishers logoMicrosoft’s top Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty chap, Tom Rubin, had some inter­est­ing points to make at the UK AOP:

Start­ing back in the early 1990s, some lead­ing Inter­net pun­dits espoused the motto “inform­a­tion wants to be free” and implored con­tent own­ers to simply give away their con­tent and mon­et­ize it through sec­ond­ary means – such as con­certs and tee-shirts for musi­cians and, in the case of media, the prom­ise of a strong income stream by adopt­ing a busi­ness model con­sist­ing of free and lib­eral dis­tri­bu­tion plus online advertising.

And that’s exactly what most news­pa­pers did. By the late 1990s, almost all news­pa­pers put their valu­able report­ing and exclus­ive com­ment­ary online and allowed it to pro­lif­er­ate, eas­ily access­ible and free.

They did just as the new model pro­fessed and sold advert­ising to mon­et­ize the increased audi­ence they were attracting.

Well, here we are ten years later bom­barded almost daily by announce­ments of news­pa­per lay­offs and closures.

The evid­ence is in, and I think we can safely say that the “inform­a­tion wants to be free” approach not only does not work, actu­ally it has been a dis­aster for almost all news­pa­pers. Con­tinue read­ing →

The News Media’s Lessons From The Obama Campaign

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Obama textMy chums — the Car­ni­vores of Journ­al­ism (read in tooth and claw) — are rip­ping apart the les­sons for the news media from the online elect­oral cam­paign­ing of President-elect Barack Obama.

Here’s my mes­sage for the old news media. You missed a rev­enue stream. Auc­tion endorsements.

Don’t be fooled by the SMS and Face­book wrap­pers. This is not the Paypal pub­lic sphere. We’re not all friends and Obama didn’t twit­ter his way to the White House. Con­tinue read­ing →

A Media Micro-Mogul writes…

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Nick Denton, Gawker Media’s micro-mogul, usu­ally has a nice line in online media busi­ness ana­lysis. But here, alas, he dis­ap­points [my ital­ics]:

1. Get out of cat­egor­ies such as polit­ics to which advert­isers are averse.… media groups can­not afford in the cur­rent envir­on­ment to fund their most noble mis­sions; they should leave that to public-spirited non-profits such as Pro Pub­lica. [Typ­ical Denton starter — except, of course, that he loves the less prof­it­able parts of his own micro-empire.] Con­tinue read­ing →