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 barking mad. – John Duncan, former managing editor of the Observer, 1999 to 2005, Press Gazette >>>
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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 of Literacy, his 1957 critique of British popular culture. In conversation with the once angry young man, now grand old man of British cultural studies, DJ Taylor evaluates Hoggart’s thesis 50 years on — a culture devised by ordinary people for themselves is being stamped… >>>
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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, a “born mischief-maker who has made a fortune out of gossip”, by the Guardian’s James Silver, a Gawker underling reveals: We got quarterly bonuses based on traffic which results in this all-day obsessive monitoring of traffic. As long as page views stay high, advertising rates… >>>
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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 to publish your thoughts or your pictures. They are just glad that you are doing so. Why? Because in an information based economy, data is your primary natural source. And flow of data creates movement which can be harnessed. Like a water-mill. – bopuc/weblog >>>
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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 space devoted to news. Profits will certainly go up. But then newspapers will certainly die. Which wouldn’t matter if newspapers weren’t fundamental to the creation of a well-informed citizenry. Yeah, but – isn’t the growth of the blogosphere making up for this? And acting as… >>>
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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 do exactly this. Truthdig is “an attempt to put out a good solid magazine of substance that has a progressive point of view.” Rather than competing with old media, he aims to produce “evergreen” copy giving readers in-depth analyses on current news stories. How 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, says Jarvis. While US newspapers fret about their problems – staff layoffs, increased competition, less revenue, lower stocks, general fear and loathing, European papers are reaching out to zeros and ones. Like their European counterparts, US newspaper folk should seize the digital day. Newspapers need… >>>