Journalism
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Fred Wilson’s talk at LeWeb
I’m bummed that I missed LeWeb, but I’m glad I got to see and hear Fred Wilson’s talk there, given on Tuesday. I can’t recommend it more highly. Go listen. It might be the most leveraged prophesy you’re ever going to hear. I’m biased in that judgement, because the trends Fred visits are ones I’ve devoted my… Continue reading
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Live blogging Studio 20’s Open Studio at NYU
Below is my live blogging, in outline form, of the final presentations of work by NYU graduate journalism students in Jay Rosen’s Studio 20 class, which I’ve served for three semesters as a visiting scholar. Open Studio was the name of the event. I wrote and posted it with Fargo.io. Blake Hunsicker, on the left,… Continue reading
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Is it too late to save the Net from the carriers?
In Big Cable’s Sauron-Like Plan for One Infrastructure to Rule Us All, Susan Crawford (@SCrawford) paints a bleak picture of what awaits us after television (aka cable) finishes eating the Internet. But that’s just in our homes. Out in the mobile sphere, telcos have been eating the Net as well — in collusion with cable.… Continue reading
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The only way publishing can escape the forest of silos
The Forrest of Silos problem I describe in the last post is exactly what Josh Marshall of TPM is dealing with when he says (correctly) “there’s no single digital news publishing model” — and what Dave Winer also correctly talks about here.) Every publisher requiring a login/password, or using ‘social logins’ such as those provided by Facebook and Twitter, is living in an administrative… Continue reading
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Plantings in pictures
It’s interesting to see where photos end up (or start out, or re-start out) when one puts them in position to be used and re-used with minimized friction. The one above, of a coal-fired power plant in Utah that supplies electricity to Los Angeles, and which I shot from a flight overhead in January 2009,… Continue reading
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What the ad biz needs is to exorcize direct marketing
In What the ad biz needs is writers, Michael Wolff bemoans the absence of good writers in advertising: …even creatives want to avoid writing — because they can’t… While technological disruption is most often blamed for the existential predicament of the media business, the more precise problem is that advertising doesn’t work as well as… Continue reading
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Pirate radio lives, big time, in New York
Last Saturday evening I was walking up Wadsworth Avenue in Manhattan, a few blocks north of 181st Street, when I passed a group of people sitting sitting on the steps of an apartment building. They were talking, drinking, eating snacks and listening to a boom box set to 94.9FM. A disc jockey chattered in Spanish,… Continue reading
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The postal model of privacy
On February 25, 2008, the FCC held a hearing on network management practices in the Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School, hosted by the Berkman Center. In that hearing David P. Reed, one of the Internet’s founding scientists, used a plain envelope to explain how the Internet worked, and why it is wrong for anybody other than intended recipients to look inside… Continue reading
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News: Watching Cable Die
Now that Al Jazeera English‘s stream has been killed in the U.S., the only two streaming global news organizations available on computers and mobile devices are France24 and RT. They look like this: In other words, like TV. Talking heads and reports from the field. Also like PR. I certainly get that from RT, the… Continue reading
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Breaking news: Al Jazeera kills its live stream
If you have an Al Jazeera app on your U.S. mobile device you can no longer watch or listen to live streams. Click on the yellow LIVE button and then on “PLAY” next to “Watch Live” or “Listen Live” and here is what happens: Go to the Al Jazeera website, click on “watch now” and you… Continue reading
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Daily Outline
Media The Natives Are Feckless, Part 2. By Bob Garfield in MediaPost. Pull quote: “For the sake of their audiences and for the sake of their own reputations, publishers must not let the content in any way disguise itself as editorial matter. Period.” How YouTube changes everything. By Miguel Helft @FortuneMagazine Designs for a networked beat. By… Continue reading
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News isn’t about cable. Or newspapers. It’s about us.
Read Dave’s Cable News is Ripe for Disruption. Then Jay Rosen’s Edward Snowden, Meet Jeff Bezos. Then everything Jeff Jarvis has been writing about lately. Then listen to the August 9 edition of On The Media. Pay special attention to the history of New York’s newspapers, and the strike of 1962-3. Note how vitally important… Continue reading
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Al Jazeera isn’t covering some big news about itself
Right now if you want live streaming of TV news, 24/7, on the Net, here in the U.S., from a major global news organization, you have just two choices: Al Jazeera and France24. Soon you’ll have just one, because Al Jazeera’s stream is going away. That’s because the company will turn its stream off when… Continue reading
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Daily Outline
Cool Britt Blaser’s flying stories. The dude is a terrific writer who has lived to tell, and tell well. He should do that more often. Speaking of which, I interviewed him for this podcast. How 24 Tiny Satellites Could Change Business Forever. By Nate Hindman and Joe Epstein. Subhead: “Skybox doesn’t want to see pictures of Earth from… Continue reading
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A good word for a good cause
@BlakeHunskicer has a kickstarter project, Fleeing the War at Home: An interactive documentary introducing the crisis in Syria through the personal histories and dreams of Syrian refugees, with a few days and a few thousand dollars left to go. Blake is one of the graduate students I got to know this last year as a visiting… Continue reading
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Markets Why shouting about discounts won’t satisfy your customers, by Natalie Brandweiner in MyCustomer From Disney to dishwashers: Digital CRM to change customer experience, by Ashley Smith in SearchCRM. Venture Capital Funding At Its Lowest Since 2010 — A By The Numbers Look. By Meghan Casserly in Forbes. ArkOS: Your data, your rules. It explains,… Continue reading
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Long-form never stopped working
Fashions come and go. Verities do not. One verity respected by many old-fashioned writers and publishers is the simple fact that long-form pieces work better than short-form ones for the purpose of communicating in depth. If you want deep, and you’re writing prose, more of it will work better than less of it, given an… Continue reading
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Outlining vs. Formatting
Dave makes a profound distinction in his post this morning titled Outliners and Word Processors. For the first time I not only grok what I already knew about outlining, but why it’s so much better as a way to write than word processing ever was. The distinction is a bit hard to see because Word… Continue reading
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The (almost) complete OMNI archive
I was excited to learn, via BoingBoing, that “The complete run of Omni… is now available for free on the Internet Archive.” So I eagerly went there, hoping to find two pieces of mine published early in the legendary magazine’s run. The first (there on the left) ran in December 1978 and the second ran… Continue reading