Comments on: It’s not the platform, redux

By: BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Publish or publish

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Publish or publish — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 21:20:35 +0000

[...] The other day, in an aside, I found it anachronistic that WordPress still has us “publish” posts. But Brendan Greeley of Open Source Radio emailed this bit of research: Hey, I just checked the derivation, because I was curious. “Publish” is from “publicare,” roughly, “to make public.” That is, it doesn’t have anything to do with paper at all. This isn’t just to nitpick, it’s to make the point that what we traditionally understand as “publisher” — someone who pays for paper to be printed — is only an accident. The verb isn’t anachronistic; what it came to mean is. [...]

By: Jon Garfunkel

Jon Garfunkel — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 04:29:06 +0000

Let’s play buzzmachine-buzzword-bingo!
Journalists don’t own trust… strawmen do.
Internet is not a medium, but a means; not a thing, but place… maybe let’s call the whole thing off and call it a metaphor?
Not a platform shift… a paradigm shift! (why can’t these papers get their shift together?)

By: Fred Z

Fred Z — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 22:20:38 +0000

Don’t forget the hostility. Some folks (me) are so upset at newspaper elitism, stupidity and lies that we are hoping they’ll decline or fail. I often refuse to cough up a buck for the local rag, even if a front page story looks interesting or there’s something I do want to read. I get it online elsewhere or go to McDonalds, buy a coffee, and read one of the free copies. I’d rather Micky D had the buck than the local rag.

A question for circulation auditors. McDonald’s staff tell me they are not charged for the 30 copies delivered every day by the paper. Is that paid circulation?

By: Robert Feinman

Robert Feinman — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 21:22:56 +0000

I thought the decline of newspapers was due to the fact that most people drive to work now instead of taking mass transportation.
If you drive you have no time to read the paper in the morning or afternoon.
Putting it online isn’t going to help unless you plan to read it at work!

The lack of diversity is also an issue. If people can’t find publications with an outlook similar to their own they’re less likely to read it. Back in the day New York had 100 dailies.
Now we have 100,000 blogs…

By: ToddG

ToddG — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 20:34:01 +0000

I don’t think ‘publish’ is necessarily anachronistic, at least not in denotation. The first definition I looked up shows ‘publicare’, “make public” as a/the distant Latin root. So it doesn’t appear the word itself is tied to any specific medium. I suppose common usage has tied it more to print, but maybe better to liberate it than try to come up with a new term…

By: Andrew Tyndall

Andrew Tyndall — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:10:09 +0000

Rick:

The problem for newspapers and television appears to be as sources of local news. For national and international coverage (so far), TV seems to have a leading position as the source of online video feeds. In this sense bbc, msnbc, cnn and so on seem to have pulled off the first steps towards “platform shift” rather than being confounded by it. The good people at Lost Remote are on top of these trends. Of course, I am only talking about the popularity of these ventures, as in numbers of hits. Their journalistic quality or their profitability are other considerations. For those it seems too soon to tell.

By: KirkH

KirkH — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 17:49:27 +0000

Inflammatory Q: Are you allowed to write about the craziness at the NYTimes? I ask because this appears to be the first time you’ve been scooped by the brilliant but less than prolific Jay Rosen. Can we assume your lack of comment means you don’t care for the recent pay per Bush bash Op-Ed system?

By: Rick Ellis

Rick Ellis — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 15:35:42 +0000

My experience has been that this attitude is just as prevalent in the television industry.

TV execs look at the online world, and have convinced themselves that somehow all they need to do to make buckets of money is repurpose their current content and editorial approach to another medium.

And ultimately, I think it’s as doomed an approach as the one being pushed by newspaper execs. The only difference is that the newspaper industry is about five years ahead of TV in the “getting smacked by new approaches” bell-curve.