Money
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Net Costs
… conned by the numbers from their web departments and aided and abetted by laughably inconsistent web metrics… newspaper owners will strip newspapers of the resources they need to reinvent themselves in order to nurture an internet beast that they believe is a rottweiler puppy but is, in fact, a fully grown poodle. They are >>>
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Class Acts
Curious to note that sensitive US indie-rock band Death Cab for Cutie — catch them on Atlantic Records, a subsidiary of the colossal Warner Music Group, catch them on the OC, Fox’s top-rating TV drama about the affluent youth of Orange County, CA — ultimately gets its name from sociologist Richard Hoggart, from The Uses >>>
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Carrots, Sticks, Journalism and Nick Denton
Writers at NYC’s Gawker Media get paid bonuses for the volume of traffic and page views their stories generate, according to bitter and jaded hacks getting drunk in one of the dives on Fifty-second Street uncertain and afraid as the clever hopes expire etc an inside source. In a profile of Gawker boss Nick Denton, >>>
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Rich Pickings
The motto of the bubble was get big fast. The rule today is get big cheap… What tickles my checkbook is the success of capital-efficient startups where the users themselves often contribute the feature road map, software and marketing. – David Cowan, Bessemer Ventures in Forbes Magazine [The bankrollers] don’t care about your newfound ability >>>
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Harmful If Swallowed
Yeah, the Kool-Aid does taste funny. Molly Ivins tears into the assumption that the newspaper business is dying because it isn’t delivering profits. Sure, there’s a steady decline in the industry over the long term. But profits are still happening. What’s killing newspapers is a mania for profits at any cost. Cut reporters and the >>>
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Publish and Be Financially Independent
It sounds like a mission impossible: set up a progressive publication, one which doesn’t shirk from flicking the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, and don’t worry if the money doesn’t immediately roll in. Robert Scheer, former columnist at the LA Times, sacked, he says, because of his opposition to the Iraq War, is trying to >>>
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Press Exchange
At an in-house pow-wow last month looking at what’s next for the Guardian following its shrink from broadsheet to Berliner, editor Alan Rusbridger, chatting to blogger and Guardian Unlimited columnist Jeff Jarvis, downplayed the newspaper’s gleaming new printing presses. They may be the last presses we ever own. – Alan Rusbridger, Buzzmachine Way to go, >>>