Home
26 Mar 08
The News Business: Out of Print: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
-
A long and thoughtful article on what's happening to the newspaper business. I think there are lessons in here for book publishers.
The killer quotes for me:
No less challenging is the rapid transformation that has taken place in the public’s understanding of, and demand for, “news” itself. Rupert Murdoch, in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in April, 2005—two years before his five-billion-dollar takeover of Dow Jones & Co. and the Wall Street Journal—warned the industry’s top editors and publishers that the days when “news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deigned to tell us what we could and should know,” were over. No longer would people accept “a godlike figure from above” presenting the news as “gospel.” Today’s consumers “want news on demand, continuously updated. They want a point of view about not just what happened but why it happened. . . . And finally, they want to be able to use the information in a larger community—to talk about, to debate, to question, and even to meet people who think about the world in similar or different ways.”
he Huffington Post made a gesture in the direction of original reporting and professionalism last year when it hired Thomas Edsall, a forty-year veteran of the Washington Post and other papers, as its political editor. At the time he was approached by the Huffington Post, Edsall said, he felt that the Post had become “increasingly driven by fear—the fear of declining readership, the fear of losing advertisers, the fear of diminishing revenues, the fear of being swamped by the Internet, the fear of irrelevance. Fear drove the paper, from top to bottom, to corrupt the entire news operation.” Joining the Huffington Post, Edsall said, was akin to “getting out of jail,” and he has written, ever since, with a sense of liberation. But such examples are rare.
- aweber9 on 2008-03-26
12 Mar 08
BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » At the Media Summit
- here's the key quote: Iger: "Disney isn’t embracing the internet so much as embracing consumers and to be relevant to and reach them, they need to use the technology." - aweber9 on 2008-03-12
Media Grunt: Michael Bazeley » RIP Mercury News
- One of two interesting posts with perspectives on changes at the San Jose Mercury News. - aweber9 on 2008-03-07
05 Mar 08
The New Economics of Brands - Harvard Business Online's Umair Haque
- This is a really interesting piece on the evolution of marketing and brand building. It's also worth linking to the NYT piece referenced. - aweber9 on 2008-03-05
10 Oct 07
Times Emit: Freeconomics: Radiohead vs. Publishers
-
Add Sticky NoteFrom where we sit, there is more “evidence” to suggest that digital distribution of books (generally in the “free PDF download” model) actually benefits awareness and sales, than there is evidence to suggest it damages it. Cory Doctorow does it; Tim O’Reilly (a publisher) does it; Seth Godin does it; lots of people are evangelical about doing it. (Our own James Bridle is putting his money where his mouth is and doing it with his new book.)
- check out this cool sticky note! - on 2007-10-10
Top Tags
Public Tags (44)
Andrew Weber's Public Lists (0)
No lists have been created yet.
"List" is a great way to organize, share and display your specific collection of bookmarks.
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo