The lack of security and privacy online has some technology experts pushing for a do-over on the Internet, according to a Sunday Week in Review article in the New York Times.
“What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a ‘gated community’ where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety,” writes John Markoff.
There are plenty of people who can muster outrage at Alex Rodriguez, the Yankees third baseman who is the latest example of win-at-any-cost athletes. But I’d prefer to see him as at the cutting edge of another scourge–the growing encroachment on privacy.
New York fashion week officially kicks off this Friday and Twittering fashionistas have already started sending out updates with #NYFW tags.
Among the fashionable set, scoring a runway invitation imparts cachet because shows are invite-only and often, the invitations are nontransferable.
On Monday, the New York Times’s blog The Moment told its 9,753 Twitter followers that it was offering up tickets to “Project Runway” winner Christian Siriano’s Feb. 19 show.
It won’t be easy for publishers to overcome the Original Sin of giving away their valuable content for free. But it could be done. Theoretically.
The most logical way, as suggested prominently by David Carr in the New York Times and Walter Isaacson on the cover of Time Magazine, is some sort of micropayment system.
I’m not sure why the micropayments-as-the-savior-of-journalism meme seems to have taken off of late, but I’m glad there are lots of people trying to squash it: I’d particularly recommend Gabe Sherman and Clay Shirky. But in the case of Steve Brill’s “secret memo” on the subject, it’s worth responding to some of his specifics.
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.
In 2001, the last time the Internet ad market crashed, the biggest publishers figured one thing they could do to make the best of things is make it easier for marketers to buy ads on Web sites. They created standard sizes for banner ads and other formats, through the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Charles Tillinghast, president of MSNBC.com, talks about how the online ad business has done since then.
These are, as you may have heard, tough times for newspapers. But they are not the first tough times. In just four years during the mid-1960s, for instance, New York City lost the papers that had come to carry the nameplates of William Randolph Hearst’s American, James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, Hearst’s Journal, the Mirror, the Sun, the Telegram, Horace Greeley’s Tribune and Joseph Pulitzer’s World.
Anthony Lake served as one of Barack Obama’s principal counselors on foreign affairs during the campaign and exchanged email messages with him regularly. But now that Mr. Obama is president, Mr. Lake no longer has his email address.
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.
Virtually all the predictions about the death of old media have assumed a comfortingly long time frame for the end of print–the moment when, amid a panoply of flashing lights, press conferences, and elegiac reminiscences, the newspaper presses stop rolling and news goes entirely digital.
What if the privately held Huffington Post is worth not $200 million–a cracked-out number floated last year–or even $100 million, but, say, $2 mil? This is not entirely an academic question, given that in December HuffPo astonished media watchers by securing $25 million in additional funding from Oak Investment Partners, a Palo Alto, Calif., venture capital firm.
The golfing star Natalie Gulbis recently joined the microblogging site Twitter, where she gives the public frequent updates of her life in short text messages, or tweets. First, though, there had to be a meeting between her media consultant, Kathleen Hessert, and other advisers.
Text messaging is a wonderful business to be in: About 2.5 trillion messages will have been sent from cellphones worldwide this year. The public assumes that the wireless carriers’ costs are far higher than they actually are, and profit margins are concealed by a heavy curtain.
The question is not whether the nation is overwhelmed with checking email and RSS feeds, answering calls, exchanging instant messages, surfing the Web, watching YouTube and playing that one game where you try to organize the falling blocks. The question is how much money all of this costs.
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