Your average journalist usually begins his career with a pop, like a big bottle of champagne. He effervesces about his profession, intoxicating all who encounter him. The party goes on for years as the young journalist conquers deadlines, corrupt politicians, and hidebound editors.
At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified.
“Check the source” may be the first rule of journalism. But in the coverage of the protests in Iran this month, some news organizations have adopted a different stance: publish first, ask questions later. If you still don’t know the answer, ask your readers.
Okay, question time: Imagine you’re a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrival has somehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country’s biggest political scandal of the decade.
Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.)
The NY Times is running an article about a bunch of illustrators complaining that Google offered to promote their work for free as special skins for its Chrome browser.
The New York Post yesterday ran a squishy story with the nifty headline “Fear Grips Google,” that seems to be the talk of the tech blogosphere today on a fairly news-less Monday. The thesis is that the search giant has sprung into action out of concern of some of the early kudos Microsoft is getting for Bing, its new search engine.
Word to those who think the Internet spells the end of traditional print media: “hacker journalists” have arrived to save the day.
The Wall Street Journal may be getting more expensive.
I think I’ll remember last week as the moment when I finally knew, with a certainty approaching fatigue, that the newspaper industry – the business and passion that both shaped and warped me over the past 20 years – had chosen ritual suicide.
An alarm went off on some desk at The New York Times business section: Oh-oh, time to slam blogs again.
When newspaper executives met in Chicago last week to discuss new business models for the industry, they expected to hear from Steve Brill about his well-publicized venture to charge for online content.
Apparently there was a big meeting of news executives today in Chicago under the auspices of the Newspaper Association of America.
The Observer’s John Koblin reports that the NY Times is considering putting a meter on usage of its site and charging once you’ve read too much.
While readers of the print version of The New York Times spend an average of 40 minutes a day, visitors to the Web site (a vastly bigger number) spend just 30 hours minutes per month.
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The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.
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