News is a subset of the conversation
Here’s a tale that reveals how journalists tend to think of their role in the conversation that makes up news and society.
I think the conversation is happening all around us, with or without the journalists. I teach now that it’s the role of the journalist to add value to that conversation: verification, debunking, facts,...
The state of the art of news
My response to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s study that found most original reporting in Baltimore still comes from major media:
No shit.
We need a study to determine this? Well, maybe we do. I think it is worthwhile to have a baseline to compare where news goes in years to come. When I argued...
Surrendering advertising … killing bundling
Two things strike me about News Corp.’s battle to get cable fees:
(1) Again and again lately, the company is surrendering the advertising battle. In newspapers, it is saying that advertising won’t support its high costs and so it will sacrifice traffic and advertising the hopes of building build pay walls. In MySpace, the company...
Bankruptcy squandered
Tweet: Here’s what I think bankrupt newspaper companies should be doing.
The AP lists the status of six newspaper companies that have declared bankruptcy: Tribune, Freedom, Philadelphia, Sun-Times, Journal Register, Star-Tribune, representing 66 daily newspapers among them.
Mostly they are using bankruptcy merely to restructure the debt they shouldn’t have gotten themselves into in the...
Media after the site
Tweet: What does the post-page, post-site, post-media media world look like? @stephenfry, that’s what.
The next phase of media, I’ve been thinking, will be after the page and after the site. Media can’t expect us to go to it all the time. Media has to come to us. Media must insinuate itself into our streams....
New Business Models for News talk
Here’s my talk on CUNY’s New Business Models for News at our summit in New York:Jeff Jarvis on New Business Models for News 2009 from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.
And here’s my latest Prezi:
Nose, face, cut, spite: Blocking Google
There’s been a swine flu of stupidity spreading about the Murdoch meme of blocking Google from indexing a site’s content (to which Google always replies that you’ve always been able to do that with robots.txt – so go ahead if you want). I love that The Reach Group (TRG), a German consulting company, has quantified...
My advice to German media
I have an op-ed in today’s Welt Kompakt newspaper in Germany giving my advice to a German mediasphere that I see becoming more protectionist. It’s not online (ironically) but so you can see the play, a PDF of it is here and here. This is my original English text:
* * *
At the Müncher Medientage,...
The X Prizes for news (and media)
A conversation with our Knight Foundation friends at Aspen inspired me to think through what an X Prize for news could accomplish. Then this week’s report in the New York Times about the awarding of the NetFlix X Prize – and the far greater value it created, not just for NetFlix, but for its participants...
Tinkering with the news
This morning, Glam.com – the model of the new network model of media – extended its Twitter aggregator, Tinker.com, into news at Tinker.com/news. It’s very simple and that’s what makes it intriguing: headlines mixed with current discussion of them.
Yesterday, New York Times digital strategy head Martin Nisenholtz also talked about adding value to Twitter...
Did we ever pay for content?
In an essay that, on first blush, ranks near to Clay Shirky’s seminal thinking-the-unthinkable think piece, Paul Graham argues that we never paid for content:
In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or...
