Category: Analysis

Today’s West Virginia mine tragedy is also a media tragedy. And it is yet another illustration that newspapers are often out of date by the time they reach us. In this case, the mistake is well-known and was publicly corrected before most of us read it. But newspapers are full of stories that their readers can find in more current and often more complete versions online.
Jay Rosen uses this as an occasion to look at what newspaper should take responsiblity for. But it makes me wonder: what’s a newspaper for?
We’ve known for a while that newspapers are unsuited to covering breaking news. This is a mistake that editors and publishers are doomed to repeat until they rethink their role in the community.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

Hearst’s Houston Chronicle dropped mandatory registration Monday as part of a redesign of its site.
It will be interesting to see how dropping the registration requirement will affect the use of, and links to, its news stories by bloggers and others on the Web.
Registration data has to be a lot less useful in selling advertising than it was in the old days. Advances in behavioral targeting have made the kind of primitive demographics captured by registration to seem awfully primitive. Then, there’s the fact that Internet advertising has become a lot easier to sell in the last couple of years.
But, I’ve long considered the fact that only one industry (newspapers) requires registration to read its content to be prima facie evidence that registration is a bad idea.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

The general lack of enthusiasm for buying Knight-Ridder, either the whole company or the individual papers, is making me wonder whether the company’s stock is properly priced after all.
To justify the cost of buying the company for more its current price, you’d have to either cut costs or increase revenue. No big newspaper company is going to achieve any special cost-cutting advantages without dramatically changing their business model. For another media company (or any other company) to do this would be to incur huge risk of failure with little upside potential.
The market seems to be saying that newspaper companies are doing a pretty good job of managing the decline of their core products. Keeping these companies as pure plays may be the best way for us to manage our portfolios.
The big question remains. Can newspaper companies create the next-generation news services that the Internet audience demands, or will they remain cash cows for someone else’s big ideas?
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

My reaction to Microsoft’s Live.com site was similar to my reaction to Google’s new toolbar. The ability to display RSS feeds on a page or a widget isn’t enough to get you into the game anymore. I’m about as excited by that as I am about the ability to add a clock or the weather to something.
One thing is clear from live.com: the Spartan look of Google will soon become as ubiquitous as the information-intense look of Yahoo was in the late nineties.
The big news is that RSS is going to be everywhere and it’s going to continue to get easier for ordinary users to display headlines wherever the like without knowing how they’re doing it. We’re all going to have to become aggregators. And we’re all going to have to get better at writing headlines.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

Apple’s new iPod is not so much a video iPod, as it is an iPod that happens to play video. They’ve added a bigger screen and 50% more storage, and taken away a third of the size from their base iPod, making it an extremely attractive upgrade to a well-loved product.
Not many people are going to buy one of these to play videos, but plenty of people will buy them. In other words, video adds no value to the new iPod.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

These days, your name’s top Google results are an important part of your identity. I just discovered that stories from a community news site that I operate are the number one or two result when you Google nearly every elected official in the community, as well as the editor and publisher of the local newspaper.
How did I beat out the local paper of record? I focused on making my site friendly to search engines. The local paper, by comparison, has stuck its archives in a database that is apparently impenetrable to spiders.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

There’s an hilarious report of Jon Stewart tearing up a panel of editors at a Magazine Publishers of America event on MediaBistro this week. It’s way too long, but worth reading nonetheless, and includes an brilliant ad libbed analysis of the role of websites in magazine journalism:

Actually, though, Jon turns to Jim [Kelly, the managing editor of Time magazine] and addresses an ‘issue’: “With the speed of news today, how does Time stay relevant?” Jim reminds Jon that Time has a website. Jon shakes his head. “I’m not asking you how you get people to subscribe,” he says.

I had to Google Kelly to get his title, because if there’s a masthead on Time’s website, I couldn’t find it.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

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.