Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Throw out this lifeline

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

Throw out the lifeline with hand quick and strong:
Why do you tarry, why linger so long?
See! he is sinking; oh, hasten today
And out with the lifeboat! away, then away!

(Refrain:)

Throw out the lifeline! Throw out the lifeline!
Someone is drifting away;
Throw out the lifeline! Throw out the lifeline!
Someone is sinking today.

– From the hymn by Edwin S. Ufford, 1888.

Today I was one of six lecturers at the annual kickoff symposium for “Know Your Chicago,” a 61-year-old fall tour series run out of the University of Chicago’s Graham School of General Studies. What quickly became clear as I delivered my talk, “When Worlds Collide: The Journalist, Technology, and the Audience,” was that this particular audience … several hundred folks who were mostly my age and older, mostly women … was deeply invested in being reassured about their morning newspapers.

In fact, I was only interrupted by applause twice, and then only in the Q&A:  once when I said I was one of those folks who valued having a printed paper in the morning, and once when I opined that some newspapers would certainly be around as long as I am (or words to that effect).  This after I had pointed out that Col. McCormick’s classic definition of a newspaper —

“The newspaper is an institution developed by modern civilization to present the news of the day, to foster commerce and industry, to inform and lead public opinion, and to furnish that check upon government which no constitution has ever been able to provide.”

— really didn’t require that the newspaper actually exist in newsprint form. What folks cherish is the idea of a newspaper, whether the Colonel’s or someone else’s.

(more…)

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Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin

Monday, April 13th, 2009
This way to the egress (NYT)   

This way to the egress (NYT)

(or do you say “Upharsin”?)

Only 7:45 a.m. and it’s taking all my available processing resources to synthesize this morning’s NYT business section, which includes:

  • A feature on how Boston is taking to the idea of having the New York Times Company shutter the Boston Globe;
  • Yet another piece on hyperlocal web sites featuring Adrian Holovaty and evaluating the world of “news without newspapers”;
  • David Carr musing on last week’s “saber rattling” by the Associated Press, on behalf of its members, in pursuit of revenue others generate from newspaper content; 
  • A disquisition on the truth about magazine subscription prices (in many cases, nearly zero) and the chances of successfully raising them (The Economist and People seem to be succeeding); and
  • Various dispatches of varying lengths from the front lines of regime change.

There is little hint of après nous in this dystopian account of le déluge. I’m thinking there would have been enough gallows humor on the copy desk yesterday in NYC to create an entire stand-up routine.

If anyone, after being weighed in the balance of the marketplace, is found not wanting.

The magazine story is the most cheerful of those above, if only because it contains quotes from executives who not only believe in the value of their journalists’ content and filtering, but are willing to test their beliefs in the marketplace rather than sit by and see their kingdoms divided.

David Carr concludes, in what I can easily turn into another unintentional reference to the aftermath of Belshazzar’s feast,

“… newspapers have walked back the cat on the cost side as far as they can.  Their gaze will inevitably turn toward consumers and the portals that serve them. The reckoning is at hand.”

As long as, while their gaze shifts, they think about what will bring pleasure and value to those consumers, creating a habit-based business as successful as those whose models are eroding by the minute, or by the inch.  Otherwise, the Medes of Sunnyvale and Persians of Mountain View will indeed divide the spoils.

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Poisson d’avril, take 3

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
Fill in the blank (SFGate)

Fill in the blank (SFGate)

The chattering classes, or the Twittering classes anyhow, are pretty much exhausted by now, after 36 hours or so of tut-tutting over the Associated Press’ announcement that it will “seek legal and legislative remedies against those who don’t” license content from the AP and its member newspapers.  Not naming any names, you understand.  Nor asking the tech staff to update the robots.txt file.

Rather than run through the bullet points on all sides of the question at hand (and yes, there are well more than two), I’m more in the mood to focus my attention on solving tomorrow’s problems instead of yesterday’s.  Tomorrow’s are about mobility and convenience, and no one has a corner on them, yet.  Let’s hope not too many innovators wind up giving depositions when they could be developing ideas.

So look elsewhere for your hand-wringing today.  Unless you want to read any of these imaginatively headlined articles:

Who’s Afraid of Google? — Wired, December 2005.

Who’s Afraid of Google? — Business Week, April 9, 2007.

Who’s Afraid of Google? — San Francisco Chronicle, May 11, 2007

Who’s Afraid of Google? — The Economist, Sept. 1, 2007 [behind a subscription wall]

There are 5,160 references to this question findable through, er, Google, but many of them are to the pieces above.  The magazine pieces are all cover stories; I guess their circulation managers are not among the fearful.

 

 

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