The speech the NAA should hear
(BuzzMachine, April 7th) - "you blew it" - a strong rant on the state of the States especially, having focused on milking a dying cow rather than changing with (or ahead of) the times.Is it to late now, because the financial situation has turned years of cash reserves into weeks of burn-rate funds? Because there just isn't money enough to go around?
Only 20% of users use frontpage - rest from search, aggregators, blogs etc? Not quite the situation in Norway and the Nordic markets, but a strong reminder that more ways of finding content also means more ways of 'losing' control
Google's Love For Newspapers & How Little They Appreciate It
(Danny Sullivan, April 6th) - thoughts on the "print is the quality stuff, online is auto" (as said by surprisingly many abroad and locally), and the search (pun intended) for scapegoats, blaming google for being too good at search and then not blocking them out? Starts with an h...Bit narrow overall, but solid on the google relationship and options.
Future May Be Brighter, but It's Apocalypse Now
('Chaos Scenario' author et al. Bob Garfield on March 23rd) You have to love the title. Cross referencing 80-ies movies across genres and slogans? Priceless. And it wasn't even "edited by brooke""economies are unsentimental and denial unproductive" -expand the horizon and mass media with advertizing becomes a short blip. Word of mouth. Trust and relationships. That goes back a bit. Things have changed, and will continue to change.
mr OTM and adage goes through the media channels one by one, leaving no hope hanging, no rosy tint unbleamished. It certainly bodes well as an indicator of the entertainment value of the book, but not quite so well for the businesses and employees at hand.
"if you can watch TV programs on your actual TV, with very few ads and no subscription fees to a cable middleman, why wouldn't you?" Convergence is coming. Convergence is here.
And even the online "giants" get theirs, since online is also "killing" itself - anyone can blog, so everyone blogs, so "no one" gets a premium cpm and margins plummet faster than Moores law reduces tech costs.
The first two both from jayrosen_nyu - there are many thoughts and ideas out there, but unless we trust someone to distill them for us, how can we even hope to have the time to cover it all for ourselves? We publish well over a hundred stories on average (in the rss feed), and that excludes the majority of the sport coverage.
Can you build a trusted position with just a bit of content? Become a gateway with an opinion and bit of unique flavour? How much tech and personel can you support that way? How big or small can the audience get while still being valuable enough to warrant ad sales?
...and the sun got a bit covered in the afternoon, still hoping for a bright easter and some time on the bike...
