Voices » readers

Jeff Bezos: Kindle Books and Readers Are Separate Businesses

Saul Hansell — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:02:02 +0000

By Saul Hansell, Writer, Bits, New York Times

In the future, Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle e-book reader will display more book formats beyond its own. And you should also expect to see Kindle books on a lot more devices.

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Why Television Still Shines in a World of Screens

Randall Stross — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 08:02:59 +0000

By Randall Stross, Professor, San Jose State University; Columnist, Digital Domain, New York Times

Subscribers to print newspapers have gone missing, as everyone knows. Book publishers are also wondering where readers have disappeared to.

And yet television stands out as the one old-media business with surprising resilience. Though we are spending a record amount of time online, including a record amount of time watching video, we are also watching record amounts of very old-fashioned television, according to Nielsen Media Research. Our attachment to the medium, of course, is obscured by the splintering of our attention across so many cable offerings, in addition to the major networks.

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How Newspapers Tried to Invent the Web

Jack Shafer — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:04:27 +0000

By Jack Shafer, Editor at Large, Slate.com

A moment of sympathy, please, for newspapers, whose readers and advertisers have been fleeing at a frightening rate.

It would be easy to accuse editors and publishers of being clueless about the coming Internet disruption and to insist that the industry’s proper reward for decades of haughty attitude, bad planning, and incompetence is bankruptcy.

But newspapers have really, really tried to wrap their hands around the future and preserve their franchise, an insight I owe to Pablo J. Boczkowski’s 2004 book, Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers. The industry has understood from the advent of AM radio in the 1920s that technology would eventually be its undoing and has always behaved accordingly.

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Why Not Writing a Story Is Innovation

Josh Korr — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 08:03:34 +0000

By Josh Korr, Editor, Publish 2.0

Discussions about journalism innovation usually focus on technology: Twitter, RSS, Flash, Django, data visualization, and all the other cool stuff that’s making online news so rich.

But there’s an equally important conceptual aspect of journalism innovation. Newsrooms have to rethink the kinds of stories they cover and the way they tell those stories or all the new technologies could be wasted on news that readers don’t find relevant or interesting.

To do this, they have to practice innovation-by-omission. That is, they need to stop writing stories that don’t deserve to be written.

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