The news that Google is placing ads on Google News has sent a renewed wave of hand-wringing through the newspaper industry. How dare those Googlers make online news a profitable business! Of course, Google is planning to keep most of that profit. Good on them!
Here is a hard cold fact of the Internet age. Any content creator whose sole business is selling their content à la carte will have a hard time surviving. In a world of unlimited digital choice, the cost of creating and marketing content that generates a profit is expensive and difficult. Which is exactly why the successful sites have been aggregators. So what are newspapers to do?
There was a time when the geeks who keep a company’s tech systems running could get by without knowing the finer details of corporate strategy. Well, those days are over. This downturn could mean the end of the sequestered CIO.
“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in January 1787. “And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” Today, we are dangerously close to having a government without newspapers.
Last Tuesday, iTunes, Apple’s ubiquitous online music store that sold more than 2.4 billion tracks last year alone, changed its own tune, announcing that songs would no longer be sold with copying restrictions and that they would be available at various prices.
Hollywood has the Oscars. Broadway has the Tonys. Now Twitter has the…Shorty Awards? The awards, announced last week by the Brooklyn Internet company Sawhorse Media, aim to honor the best Twitterers of 2008 in categories like humor, news and food.
The Boston Globe had a story about the travails of the Portland Press Herald last week, and it included a plaintive and intriguing question from a reader of the struggling, up-for-sale Maine paper: “Can you even be a major city without a daily paper?” We’re going to find out the answer to that before very long, I’m afraid. And it’s worth thinking about what such a city will look like.
If you read this blog, you might think that Kara Swisher isn’t a big fan of fun. Or at least of silly, fun apps like SuperPoke! and what we call “social entertainment.” Call me silly, but I’d take entertainment over utility any time, and you know what? I bet you would too.
One problem I’ve had with much discussion about the future of news lately is that it’s too press-centric. It focuses on the press as if it were at the center of the world, as if it owned news, as if news depended on it, as if solving the press’s problems solves news. That’s not the ecosystem of news now. There’s a fundamentally new structure to media, and there are many different ways to look at it. And until we realize that, I don’t think we’ll begin to create successful new models for news. So pardon my simplistic drawings, but here’s an attempt to begin to illustrate that new ecosystem of news and media.
Since CNN embraced the citizen journalist movement back in August 2006 with the launch of its iReport initiative, the news organization has received nearly 100,000 news-related photos and videos from viewers, including nearly 10,000 this past January alone. Yet less than 10% of those submissions have appeared on CNN.com or the cable channel. That’s all about to change. Time Warner’s CNN this week will enter YouTube territory with the launch of iReport.com, a new Web site built entirely on user-produced news.
This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."
We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.
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.
That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.
So here is exactly what we do: Read more »
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