NewsTrust - New Media - Most Recent Stories: Opinion

The Digital Economy's Coming Subprime Crisis (And What You Can Learn From It)

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

harvardbusiness.org - By Umair Haque - Nov. 17 (Opinion) - Today's media players aren't investing in better ads. They're investing in more — and more toxic — ads. Uh oh: it's the economic equivalent of the subprime crisis. The parallels, to me, are too striking to ignore. Here are eight time-worn steps to crisis that Wall Street took yesterday, and media's taking today. Toxicity. Wall Street's subprime crisis was built on toxic financial instruments. The mediascape's subprime crisis is being built on toxic communications. Social gaming — Facebook's Farmville, for example — is the hot growth area for VCs, advertisers, and publishers alike. But last week, TechCrunch blew the lid off it: much revenue in this nascent market is derived from scams masquerading as "ads." To me, there are striking echoes of CDOs — a hot new growth market for Wall Street, later revealed to be a house of cards.

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Good Riddance To Mainstream Media?

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

National Public Radio - By John Donvan - Nov. 12 (Opinion) - As newspapers go under, the network newscasts lose viewers and the mainstream media in general see more and more of their audience shift online, are we as a society better or worse off? Some argue that the diversity of voices available on the Internet to provide information and analysis makes for a better system. Others say a decline in traditional journalism means lower standards and fewer resources to investigate crucial stories. A panel of experts took on this topic Oct. 27 in an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate: John Hockenberry, Michael Wolff, Phil Bronstein, David Carr, Katrina vanden Heuvel. Three panelists argued for the motion "Good Riddance to Mainstream Media" and three against in an Oxford-style debate. Before the debate, the audience at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts voted 25 percent in favor of the motion and 50 percent against. Twenty-five percent was undecided. After the debate, 24 percent supported the motion "Good Riddance to Mainstream Media," while 68 percent opposed it and 8 percent remained undecided.

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Toward a Slow-News Movement

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Mediactive - By Dan Gillmor - Nov. 08 (Opinion) - Like many other people who’ve been burned by believing too quickly, I’ve learned to put almost all of what journalists call “breaking news” into the categories of gossip or, in the words of a scientist friend, “interesting if true.” That is, even though I gobble up “the latest” from a variety of sources, the closer the information is in time to the actual event, the more I assume it’s unreliable if not false. It’s my own version of “slow news” — an expression I first heard on Friday, coined by my friend Ethan Zuckerman in a wonderful riff off the slow-food movement. We were at a Berkman Center for Internet & Society retreat in suburban Boston, in a group discussion of ways to improve the quality of what we know when we have so many sources from which to choose at every minute of the day. One of society’s recently adopted cliches is the “24-hour news cycle” — the recognition that the once-a-day, manufacturing-based version of journalism has essentially passed into history for those who consume and create news via digital systems. Now, it’s said, we get news every hour of every day, and media creators work tirelessly to fill those hours with new stuff.

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Fort Hood: A First Test for Twitter Lists

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - Nov. 06 - Journalism and curation—it’s becoming increasingly difficult to determine where the one ends and the other begins. The chicken/egg relationship between the two solidified into conventional wisdom during the aftermath of the Iranian election this summer, when journalists—mostly barred from shoe-leather reporting and other, more traditional methods of newsgathering—were forced to play the role of social-media editors. In the...

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Edit This Page: Is it the end of Wikipedia?

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Review - By Evgeny Morozov - Nov. 05 (Review) - Wikipedia owes its existence to the nerdy culture of the first online discussion systems, such as Usenet; the unlikely success of moderated social sites, such as Slashdot, which was so influential in Wikipedia’s early days that the project was briefly known as “the Encyclopedia That Slashdot Built”; and the emergence of a tight community around WikiWikiWeb, the first application to use the wiki style of editing. The dotcom recession also helped by freeing a supply of superbly talented technologists from the burdens of paid employment.

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Deadline Every Login: What has and hasn’t changed in newsrooms ? My Register Experience

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Greenlee School of Journalism, Iowa State - By Michael Bugeja - Nov. 05 (Opinion) - When I worked at United Press International in the 1970s, we’d often remark how we wished we had the schedule of the typical newspaper reporter who had time to develop stories as well as relationships with his sources. Our motto, borrowed from International News Service, which merged with United Press in 1958, was, “Get it first, but get it right.” Our mantra then is chanted now in the typical digital newsroom.

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Derailing unprecedented health reform would be unprecedented

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

bestoftheleftpodcast.com - By Jay - Oct. 28 (Opinion) - Edition #309 Act 1: Kid is denied healthcare for being too skinny – The Young Turks Act 2: Max Baucus and Senate health reform – Bill Moyers Journal Act 3: Medicare Part E – Thom Hartmann Act 4: Healthcare, now what – This American Life Act 5: Dems stopping healthcare would be unprecedented – Rachel Maddow Act 6: The history of our healthcare system – This American Life Act 7: Insurance company calls sick people dogs – The Young Turks Act 8: Further reporting on anti-healthcare campaign – Rachel Maddow

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A nerd's take on the future of news media

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Craig Newmark - Oct. 19 (Opinion) - There are a lot of new technologies which already affect news consumption and future business models. As a nerd, I'm excited by the new tech, particularly mobile, including new display systems and pervasive connectivity. However, the tech is secondary,

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Against Transparency

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Lawrence Lessig - Oct. 09 (Opinion) - How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement--if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness--will inspire not reform, but disgust. The "naked transparency movement," as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.

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Post-Medium Publishing

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

paulgraham.com - By Paul Graham - Sep. 20 (Opinion) - ... 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 music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more?

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The Dirty Little Secret About the "Wisdom of the Crowds" - There is No Crowd

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Read/WriteWeb - By Sarah Perez - Sep. 17 (Opinion) - Recent research by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Vassilis Kostakos pokes a big hole in the prevailing wisdom that the "wisdom of crowds" is a trustworthy force on today's web. His research focused on studying the voting patterns across several sites featuring user-generated reviews including Amazon, IMDb, and BookCrossing. The findings showed that a small group of users accounted for a large number of ratings. In other words, as many have already begun to suspect, small but powerful groups can easily distort what the "crowd" really thinks, leading online reviews to often end up appearing extremely positive or extremely negative.

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The Rise of the Professional Blogger

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Benjamin Carlson - Sep. 13 (Opinion) - Today, the romantic notion that solitary, untamed bloggers are running the Web is more fantasy than fact—nearly as apocryphal as old myths about stoic Western sheriffs killing 11 outlaws with six bullets.

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What Makes a Digital Native?

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Frontline - Aug. 30 (Interview) - What Makes a Digital Native? For starters, they take technology for granted, says author Marc Prensky.

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Facebook's Purchase Is Bid to Own Social Media

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Chadwick Matlin - Aug. 16 (Opinion) - Facebook just bought the rights to nearly everything you do online. And it cost them only $47.5 million.

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Sotomayor Sworn In, Becoming Supreme Court’s First Hispanic Justice

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Amy Goldstein - Aug. 08 (Press Release) - Sonia Sotomayor was sworn in Saturday morning as the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court in a brief ceremony that completed a remarkable ascent for a Puerto Rican girl from the South Bronx .

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The ‘green revolution’

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Dawn - By Bina Shah - Aug. 04 (Editorial) - the vast majority of our people still get their news from the radio and the television, as well as by word of mouth. There’s a mobile phone revolution underway in Pakistan at the moment, but again, our literacy rate is too low to truly take advantage of the social media revolution which is largely visual and text-based. This could change in the future, but for now, we have yet another example of how our poor education levels restrain us when it comes to keeping up with the rest of the world.

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AOL Newsroom Now Has (Wow) 1,500 Writers

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Michael Arrington - Jul. 29 (Opinion) - In June we wrote about to evolve into an online media powerhouse just as the print media world is falling apart. New CEO hasn?t been pinned down on how hard he?s betting on this strategy in public . But the strategy is clearly kicking into high gear anyway, even as the company prepares for a public spinoff from parent company Time Warner. AOL now has 1,500 people writing content across its scores of content sub-brands, we?ve confirmed. Around 1,000 of those people are working full time for AOL, the rest are freelancing. That?s more than double the number that they had creating content a year ago, and by this time next year, we?ve heard, the plan is to have 2-3x as many people as they do now.

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The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

dashes.com - By Anil Dash - Jul. 24 (Opinion) - Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like

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Introducing: the journalist of the future

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

adamwestbrook.wordpress.com - By Adam Westbrook - Jul. 23 (Opinion) - There’s been enough talk about the cancer spreading through modern journalism. The cutting of jobs and money, the shedding of audiences and advertising, the invasion of PR guff and the medium’s failure to reject it; and vitally, the disappearance of time for journalists to do some proper journalism.

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Charity or collaboration?

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - Jul. 22 (Opinion) - The New York Times has accepted free stories from ProPublica. It has endorsed a journalist getting help from the public via Spot.US to underwrite a story that might appear at NYTimes.com. And Poynter’s Bill Mitchell says the paper is even wondering about foundation support for its work (but for perspective, I suspect one could safely

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The Grave Dancer’s Folly

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - Jul. 22 (Editorial) - Despite the tedious posturing of both Web triumphalists (Jeff Jarvis to the Newspaper Association of America: “You blew it!”) and ideologues on either end of the political spectrum (two recent reader comments on CJR.org: “The mainstream media has sold out to our corporate controlled Congress,” and “Newspapers deserve to die like Pravda and Izveztia [sic]”), nobody is winning the debate...

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Charging for Access to News Sites

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

daringfireball.net - By John Gruber - Jul. 22 (Opinion) - Undeniably, there is money to be made in digital publishing with free reader access, but whether that revenue leads to profits depends upon the scale and scope of the organization. The potential revenue does not appear to be of the magnitude that will support the massive operations of existing news organizations.

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One Newspaper, Many Checkbooks

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Clark Hoyt - Jul. 19 (Opinion) - Lindsey Hoshan, a freelance journalist in Palo Alto, Calif., hopes to sell a multimedia slide show and maybe an article to The Times about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a mass of floating plastic trash caught in swirling currents in a stretch of ocean twice the size of Texas. But first, she has to get there. To help finance a $10,000 reporting trip aboard a research vessel, Hoshaw has turned to Spot.Us, a Web site where reporters appeal for donations to pay for their projects. If she can raise $6,000 before the September departure date — so far, only about $1,600 has come in — she will take out a loan for the rest, she said. The Times has told Hoshaw that it might pay about $700 for the pictures, more if it also buys a story.

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Not an Upgrade — an Upheaval

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Cato Unbound - By Clay Shirky - Jul. 15 (Opinion) - The hard truth about the future of journalism is that nobody knows for sure what will happen; the current system is so brittle, and the alternatives are so speculative, that there’s no hope for a simple and orderly transition from State A to State B.

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Froomkin hired by Huffington Post

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Jul. 07 (Opinion) - In yet another sign of how online media outlets are strengthening as their older establishment predecessors are struggling to survive, The Huffington Post has hired Dan Froomkin to be its Washington Bureau Chief and regular columnist/blogger. Froomkin will oversee a staff of four five reporters and an Assistant Editor, guide The Huffington Post's Washington reporting, and write at least two posts per week to be featured on its main page and Politics page. I learned last night of the hiring and spoke to both Arianna Huffington and Froomkin this morning. Under still-unclear circumstances, which executives refuse to discuss even with their own Ombudsman, Froomkin was fired by The Washington Post a little more than two weeks ago after writing an online column for almost six years that was one of that newspaper's most popular. Almost immediately upon the reporting of Froomkin's firing, screenwriter Nora Ephron, an Editor-at-Large for The Huffington Post, emailed Huffington with a one-line note: "I hope we're hiring him." Within hours, Huffington called Froomkin, met with him in Washington last week, and a deal was finalized this week. That was just one of numerous overtures Froomkin received from various media outlets interested in hiring him (Salon was one such outlet expressing preliminary interest, but both Froomkin and Salon believed that much of what I do here already overlaps with much of the work he does).

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