If you need to fill the time between now and Monday morning (or whenever you resume your normal routine), here’s your chance to make sure you didn’t miss any of last year’s most popular ruminations here at owenyoungman.com.
(Hmmm; four of the top 10 are from October, and two more are from November. I must be promoting better of late.)
Happy new year.
How America was 2-1-3’d (Oct. 6): In which we are reminded what made the LA Times the LA Times, and how the LA Times made Los Angeles, and how the LA Times sometimes made me crazy. Past tense in all cases.
There were giants . . . no, there are giants (Oct. 16): In which I hang with a variety of legends at a Tribune reunion in Greektown. As at most such events, you remember some of what you want to say, but hear mostly what others want to tell you. As at few such events, you also get to observe David Axelrod’s Secret Service detail.
The future, not the pasture (May 29): In which a gathering of Tribune alumni leads to discussions of philanthropy, public policy, health care, higher education, and journalism, more or less but not precisely in that order.
Co-operative-etition, Chicago style (Nov. 24): In which we do not look behind the scenes at the Chicago News Cooperative. Rather, we look at the choices readers had on Friday and Sunday, its debut days in the NYT.
Adventures in paid content, with actual payment (May 21): In which we begin our second foray into the world of Internet paid content, on a personal level, and display a trophy of the early Web economy.
The (fast) company we keep (June 3): In which Fast Company looks at the future and finds several things that look, to me, like the present.
Dead trees and dying cities (Oct. 22): In which Richard Rodriguez again links the withering of the SF Chronicle with the withering of San Francisco — and in so doing points to why the NYT has good reasons to contract with others for metro news both there and in Chicago.
Not dead yet, but for how much longer? (Nov. 30): In which Medill’s fall Interactive Innovation Project issues a white paper, finding that the central position newspapers have held in communicating the news of Americans’ deaths is now substantially threatened by changes in technology and audience behavior.
Who will pay? (Sept. 11): In which the end of the Chi-Town Daily News raises Scott Smith’s eternal, and piquant, question.
Looking for business models? Mind the gaps (Oct. 30): In which the continuing search for news business models takes stock of itself at Harvard, yielding a couple hundred tweets, a couple dozen sound bites, a couple good jokes, and a crying need to be single-mindedly focused on learning what audiences actually value.
Add end: And now that I have reviewed all traffic to the domain, I can report that, for the 10th or 11th consecutive year, the most visited page on the site was actually my e.e. cummings top 10 lists, which once upon a time actually was in the first page of Google results but now has dropped out of the top 10. It did get enough “Googlejuice” to wind up being assigned by a few professors here and there, and a couple times a year traffic from .edu domains goes through the roof. Time to update it again, I would say.