sfchron - Cynthia McCune on Diigo

27 Apr 09

Slouching Towards Oblivion - Columnist Maureen Dowd - NYTimes.com

I keep thinking of newspapers as Norma Desmond. Papers are still big. It's the screens that got small.

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newspapers future of news sfchron nytimes

I keep thinking of newspapers as Norma Desmond.
Papers are still big. It’s the screens that got small.
Now that everybody can check their iPhones and laptops for news that personally interests them, now that they can Google, blog and tweet, as well as shop — and stalk — on Craigslist, old-school newspapers seem like aging silent film stars, stricken to find themselves outmoded by technology.
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- Calling his purchase of The L.A. Times and The Chicago Tribune “a mistake,” Sam “The Sham” Zell said, “It’s very obvious that the newspaper model in its current form does not work and the sooner we all acknowledge that, the better.”
- A lot of readers think we’re biased, and because we think we’re unbiased, we think they must be stupid. But they’re not. They’re just opinionated.
- “That’s the most hopeful thing you can say about print journalism, that old people are living longer.”

23 Jan 09

San Francisco Chronicle Editor Ward Bushee: Forum | KQED Public Media for Northern CA

KQED - Forum with Michael Krasny

www.kqed.org/R812040900 - Preview

future of newspapers sfchron layoffs

07 Jan 09

News after Newspapers: Reinvent, for the end is near!

This guy's got a plan...unlike most newspaper publishers these days. Thanks to Steve Outing for tweeting this.

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future of news sfchron reinvent

Newspapers, especially on Sunday, have always served this "media guide" function, but haven't constructed themselves around it.
Differentiate the online site from the weekend print brand; they're two different animals from now on.
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- Differentiate the online site from the weekend print brand; they're two different animals from now on.
- Differentiate the online site from the weekend print brand; they're two different animals from now on.
- Get the online sector ready for a big jump in mobile e-readership as new devices and apps catch on.
- Attract social networks around content areas. This is critical—in a sense, newspapers have always served as community social network hubs; they need to do so online.
- Devote 20 to 30 percent of staff resources to the weekend product and turn everyone else into online reporters.
- Shift publication to the start of the weekend—Friday afternoon—to maximize the value to readers as well as newsstand shelf life. Drop all other daily editions. Concentrate sales on moving the bulk of the week's advertisers into this edition
- Take the camouflage off the Sunday package: Lose the hard news wrap.
- yet this whole package is sold as a "news" paper, in a package wrapped with a breaking news section. This may have made sense until a decade ago, but it doesn't any more. And unless it's changed, the danger is that Sunday editions will start losing money also, eliminating any hope of returning to profitability.
- it's probable that Sunday is the only day the Times is profitable.
- everyone seems to know what to do with the New York Times, except Arthur Sulzberger. Following up on Marc Andreessen's widely-quoted October pronouncement that "you have to shut off the print edition, right now," Michael Hirschorn speculates in the Atlantic that the demise of print may be more sudden and more imminent than the standard scenario of a gradual lights-out.
- "online first, print once or twice a week"
- Get the online sector ready for a big jump in mobile e-readership as new devices and apps catch on.
- The opportunity for Hearst and MediaNews in the Bay Area, and for the New York Times, is to plan now for a truly transformational step toward the news enterprise of the future, rather than another incremental set of staff cuts and tonnage reductions. It's time to reinvent, to define a whole new way of doing business.
- Return to profitability.

21 Dec 08

Grammy nominations a snooze

Is pop music dead?

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pop music sfchron Grammeys

So-called illegal downloads may no longer be the gravest danger faced by the imperiled recording industry: Just plain bad music may be what ultimately does the business in
for this dismal calendar year, critics can't come up with a consensus pick for the best album of what is probably the worst year for pop music in a lifetime.
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- Who would sign the Talking Heads today? The marketing departments run the major labels. Major labels? That's a laugh: There are only four still standing, and it's not clear in this Internet age of digital downloads just exactly what role these so-called majors will continue to play. The independent labels - where rock and soul music were born - are long gone. Alternative rock, which raised its head during the '90s as a safe harbor for the unruly original spirit of rock 'n' roll, has failed. And, by the way, alternative to what? Rock music? They don't make that anymore.
- The scramble for the year-end's best album title is clearly anybody's choice. There are no masterpieces to choose from.
- the message is clear: The populist rock movement is dead and gone. The pop music panorama in the 21st century is a bleak landscape of commercial songwriters and professional producers who long ago traded away creativity and imagination in favor of craft and cunning.
- Pop music in this century is a corporate entertainment, a lifestyle accessory, a purposeless, nearly useless disposable commodity that has practically returned the hit parade to the puerile, pointless days of "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window."
- Nobody makes records anymore simply because they like the music and, truth be told, many people in the industry don't like the music they are making. They go home and listen to old Van Morrison records like everyone else.
- Their records have been ProTooled into submission, every wrinkle smoothed out, every squeak, belch, intake of air digitally manipulated into a perfect, lifeless aural confection.

24 Oct 08

Greenspan shocked at failure of free markets

Greenspan finally realizes Ayn Rand is not only dead, but that she was a novelist...and stops believing in the fiction of a self-correcting free market.

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greenspan sfchron economy free market

It was a remarkable moment: Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, a lifelong champion of free markets, publicly questioning the philosophy that guided him throughout his years as the world's most powerful economic policymaker.
Greenspan said that, in light of a crisis he characterized as "a once-in-a-century financial tsunami," he was wrong to think financial markets could police themselves. He incorrectly had expected the discipline of the market would prevent financial institutions from taking life-threatening risks.
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- Greenspan replied that indeed he had found a flaw in his ideology, one that left him very distressed. "In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology was not right?" Waxman asked.
- For his whole adult life, the former Fed chairman has been a devotee of the philosophy of Ayn Rand, who celebrated free-market capitalism as the world's most moral economic order and advocated a strict laissez-faire approach to government regulation of the marketplace.
- "When I watched him this morning, I actually found myself feeling a little bit sorry for him," said Betty Blecha, an economist at San Francisco State University. "When ideologues find their ideology crashing around them, it's something to see."
  
  Blecha said Greenspan's reassessment impressed her.
  
  "He was intellectually honest about admitting the failings of an ideology he's believed in all his adult life. I think personally this has been a very difficult period for him."

Cynthia McCune's Library tagged sfchron → View Popular

Slouching Towards Oblivion - Columnist Maureen Dowd - NYTimes.com

San Francisco Chronicle Editor Ward Bushee: Forum | KQED Public Media for Northern CA

News after Newspapers: Reinvent, for the end is near!

Grammy nominations a snooze

Greenspan shocked at failure of free markets

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