The San Diego Union-Tribune is now offering free print classifieds to individuals who have something to sell for less than $5,000.
OK, that’s amazing. I have never known a newspaper publisher to just give newsprint to someone else. The story, from the Union-Tribune itself, has some nice statistics about the decline of classifieds in the last few years and a discussion of the impact of Craigslist and eBay specifically. It also notes that ads from individuals provide less than five percent of the paper’s ad revenue.
The story quotes the paper’s ad director as saying “This is not a move out of desperation.” I think that’s probably true. But it’s only the beginning of the journey that the net is taking newspapers on.
Do the extra pages come out of the editorial or the advertising budget? Regardless of how it’s allocated, in the long run, it comes out of editorial.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Month: August 2005
GMail has changed the way that I think about email, and Google Maps changed the way I think about online maps…just as Google changed the way I think about search.
Google’s new sidebar has not changed the way I think about sidebars.
I had the same reaction to Google’s new sidebar that I hand when I first saw Netscape’s sidebar–why would I want this thing taking up my screen space? Compared to the elegant Google Mail Notifier, Google Search feels like an exercise in what can be done, instead of what needs to be done.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
The WELL is for sale. When people talk about online community, their frame of reference– whether they know it or not–has been shaped profoundly by the experience of The WELL.
I didn’t get to experience Paris in the twenties, New York in the fifties, or San Francisco in the sixties, but I did spend too much time on The WELL in the early nineties. It’s where I, and a lot of other future Web pioneers, first learned about the Internet and about net culture.
Twenty years after its founding, The WELL’s current owner, Salon.com is selling the service. Despite billions spent in lip service to building community and hundreds of millions of new users, the Internet has not delivered another community with the magic that The WELL had.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
In a guest post on Lawrence Lessig’s blog, Nelson Pavlosky asks a thoughtful question, “when we speak of taking the free culture movement off the internet and into the streets, how can we avoid looking silly?”
Here is an issue that is profound and critical to many people who deal in ideas and information. Yet the vast majority of citizens could indeed view it as silly, unfair to artists, or driven by a desire for free music.
They’re fighting this battle for the hearts and minds of the other 90% of the public with media corporations which see this as a life-or-death struggle.
A. J. Liebling advised us not to pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel. But sometimes it’s not possible to pick your fights.
Pavlosky is right to understand that the battle over intellectual property could be seen as a side show not just by bystanders, but by the movement’s natural allies as well.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Newsweek has embraced trackback. Working with Technorati, they are providing a list of the most-blogged stories on their site, as well as trackback links on stories themselves.
This is something of a revolution–if a couple of years late. Other publishers should copy it. I’ve been ranting for more than a year that news organizations are ignoring the amazing metainformation that bloggers create for free.
There are still some kinks to be worked out. In checking out these pages, I noticed that some loaded very slowly, while the message “Waiting for mp.technorati.com” appeared at the bottom of my browser window.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.