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The crisis facing newspapers: a small case study
What if you had a newspaper with a guaranteed geographic and social community, no distribution costs, no staff costs, and only printing to pay for. Could you keep it going without taking it online? Try and solve the real-life business conundrum below. We think that having an independent press has made a difference to the…
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Decline of the sitcom mirrors decline of newspapers
My contention that the decline of newspapers is nothing fundamentally to do with the journalism gets some anecdotal support (by analogy) from British comedian Ben Elton, lamenting the decline of the sitcom: Elton also talked about the decline of traditional sitcoms that could be enjoyed by mass audiences. “I don’t think it’s the fault of…
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Solving a tiny footnote puzzle in journalism history
I love the Internet, for all the usual reasons, but today it helped solve a tiny puzzle over a footnote in a book called Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson. In the book (first published back in 1983), Anderson quoted a line from Hegel that has been much copied. Here’s an excerpt from the London Review…