Here’s a piece I wrote for BusinessWeek’s social report on publicness. Snippet:
In the company of nudists, no one is naked. We are entering an age of publicness when more and more we will live, do business, and govern in the open. Some see danger there. I see opportunity. . . .
An accompanying video:
The Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Sunday magazine this week devotes its entire issue to the future of newspapers and journalism. I have a lengthy interview in it – in Germany, I’m afraid.
If you want to hear how bad my German is, listen to the start of this video, my keynote at Next09 in Hamburg this week. (Sadly, no one told me that the camera was set to record stage left and I pace a lot.)
This interview in Spiegel Online is in German and in English.
And a nice illustration accompanies this interview in the Hamburger Abendblatt.
Finally, I was interviewed by Robin Wauters for TechCrunch at Next09 and I sucked up to Michael Arrington.
: LATER: A Zeit Online interview, subtitled in German.
This is the third of three strategies for a sustainable future of news that we’ll be working on at the CUNYNew Business Models for News Project It’s the most complex and the most important: What can fill the void when (I used to say if) a metro paper dies?
In our conference on new business models last October, we picked on Philadelphia but since then not only has its newspaper company gone bankrupt but there are so many new candidates: Minneapolis, San Francisco, Boston, and on and on.
What makes this complicated to envision, let alone model, is that a single product from a single old-fashioned company will be replaced not by a new-fangled product and company but instead by an ecosystem made of many players operating under many models and motives.
I’ve described my vision for this before but there are many variants. We can’t put it all into a single, neat spreadsheet. Instead, we’ll need to look at this future from a few angles – from the bottom-up (the hyperlocal models I wrote about earlier); from the notion of a new kind of news organization that both reports and organizes news and helps support the ecosystem; from a network that exists simply to support the ecosystem; and others. I know people working on some of these and we hope to work with them, learning as they learn and providing help.
From another perspective, we also just want to look at total resources and needs from a macro (that is, metro) level: how much is being spent now and what does it support? What could it support? What could the mix of players and their work look like? What’s most likely to be covered on its own? What will need specific support and perhaps subsidy?
In my mind’s eye, I see:
* One or more likely more news organizations that help organize and support news across the ecosystem – with content, promotion, revenue, perhaps technology, probably training.
* Ad/revenue networks also supporting the ecosystem (they could be the same but don’t have to be).
* Some level of public-supported journalism (i.e., can foundation and citizen support – local ProPublicas and Spot.USes – be sufficient to subsidize investigative reporting in a market? Can we get more investigative journalism than we have now?).
* Lots of bloggers – many of them laid-off professional journalists – trying to make a go of it covering areas and interests. The more support they have, the more of them there will be.
* Individuals volunteering their effort, contributing to bloggers, to the news organizations, to crowdsourced efforts.
* I believe we must demand transparency from government at all levels – a default of openness; every action and all information to be searchable and linkable – so there can be many more watchdogs on government helping focus where precious reporting resource should go. Part of what must come out of this project and similar efforts is not just strategies but a movement. Newspapers including the Guardian and the NY Times are beginning to collect such data and make it available in APIs. Government must have an API.
* What else?
As I’ve said in my previous posts, the first step in our work in the project is to gather data, to understand the current marketplace and the potential. This one is so broad that some of the data will be broad.
What I’d really like – but don’t have the funding or time to do – is a quantitative and qualitative audit of the total journalistic resource and output in a market: How much is spent today on everything that’s called journalism (that is to say, including happy-talk TV news and rip-and-read radio) because that is an indication of the total commercial support available? What is the proportion of that resource that goes to original journalism (i.e., beat and investigative reporting) and how much goes to repetition and production?
My point is that I know there are efficiencies to be had. The money is there and can be spent far better. Indeed, when I talked about this with someone at GoogleNews when I visited, he questioned why we should make journalism as it is the starting point of the discussion. Shouldn’t we aim higher with greater goals? Yes, but this is where the discussion is today: How do we cover a metro area when a paper dies? How do we fill that void? So what is the void? And what are the opportunities? I won’t get that audit but I’ll come back to this basis of comparison anyway.
As I said in the hyperlocal post, let’s also keep in mind that much of the forward-looking discussion must be speculative. We need to imagine new kinds of coverage and new kinds of advertising service. The guy from Google was right: If all we try to do is replace what we have, that’s not good enough. We need higher ambition.
So, what data do we need to start with? Here’s my beginning list. Please add to it:
Total ad revenue: How much is spent in each medium by what kind of advertisers (regional, local, national, individual) in what categories? What are the trends (besides classifieds dying and retail consolidating)?
New advertising opportunities: From the hyperlocal analysis: What is the potential population of new advertisers never served by media and how can they be served in new and highly targeted and efficient ways?
Total editorial staff: Even without a full audit, we need to estimate the staff devoted to news today and break it down by function, trying to get some idea of the actual reporting resource in a market.
Audience: We need a picture of the people formerly known as the audience: reach by what kind of outlet (online and off), frequency, time spent….
Content: Again, even without an audit, we need at least some picture of what’s put out today: beat coverage, investigations, event coverage, breaking news coverage, features, and so on. What does the community really need? We at least need to put a strawman to this. Some of this may be ceded – do what you do best, link to the rest – to national players that do a better job of covering interests (e.g., health, national sports, entertainment). We should not fall into the trap of replacing what we have now but instead define needs and opportunities.
Other revenue: I learned recently when I met with Axel Springer’s editors that they are making money off merchandise sales. So is the Telegraph in London. That could be a ripe new opportunity and we need to get specific. Events, training, and other services could bring in revenue. The separate effort on paid content will dovetail with this effort.
New ad models: Just as hyperlocal advertisers would be ill-served by selling banners and false scarcity (pay a premium for the home page that only 20 percent of the audience sees!) under old models, so is this true of the existing population of larger metro advertisers. We need to brainstorm new ways to serve them and then try to extrapolate revenue from that. Or better yet, start from the other direction: What are the advertisers needs and how can we find new ways to meet them?
Network potential: This fits with the hyperlocal discussion: A single site selling itself (as newspaper sites do today) is necessarily limited. We need to explore the opportunities in networks. From the top down, it means that a company can monetize content it doesn’t have to create at less cost and risk and larger scale. From the bottom up, it means that a small site can get revenue it could not sell itself but it can also sell into a network of higher value.
Contributions: Start here: About 10 percent of the listeners of NPR contribute to it. Most of the rest of NPR budgets is made up of foundation support. (Let’s please leave government to the side.) So that’s an analogue – though imperfect – for public support of journalism in a market. We will need to project how much charitable support can be raised for journalism in a market. Perhaps we even need to speculate about a foundation that does investigative and perhaps beat reporting if it’s difficult to see a clear path to commercial support. For discussion.
The value of volunteering: This feeds in from the hyperlocal model, extrapolated to the metro level.
What this looks like in the end is a map of players, what they do, and how they’re supported. And we probably need to put forward a scenario of what a day or week looks like in local news when the ecosystem replaces the legacy: What beats need to be covered, who’s doing it, and why? What are new ways to work collaboratively? Who’s covering the fires? Do we really need to cover them? How can we collect data? What new services can we create? We’re imagining a new vision of sustainable news and how it will be sustained.
Now on with the work.
[I wrote this on a plane ride and have no brain left so I apologize for typos and missing links; I'll followup with those.]
There are, of course, many views of hyperlocal and it will involve many different kinds of players, from sole bloggers to news organizations. The way I’d like to attack this is to try to create one or two optimal models for sustaining coverage in a towns, or collection of small towns, or neighborhoods in a city – the size of critical mass of the ideal minimarket is itself a key question.
I can anticipate Bob Wyman, one of the most valuable commenters here, scolding me for limiting myself to a traditional, geographically based structure. I wouldn’t argue. We will need many models that focus on coverage of shared interests as well and that will intersect with local services. But I’m starting here because the analogue is something we understand so well.
A key assumption that underpins my optimism for the future of news is that there is a new population of highly targeted (by geography or interest) businesses who never were served by news organizations that were to big, expensive, and inefficient. We will need to serve them in new ways – no longer selling scarcity in banners for eyeballs but in creating new services that help them succeed, in acting as a platform for their success. That brainstorming will be an important element of the project.
Note also that this set of models will feed into another set looking at this from the perspective of a metropolitan area, what we call the Philadelphia Project (i.e., what fills the void if and when its papers die); that will be the subject of an upcoming post. [I know, Bob, I'm still holding to old geographic models but after we plow through these, we'll start working on national and international marketplaces of content and communities and they, too, will feed into these models).
One more note: I keep calling these models but they'll really be more strategic plans. "Model" brings to mind a single spreadsheet describing a very finite business. The aim of these plans is more to show possibilities, to draw out specifics, to encourage further development and investment.
The first step in working on each of these models is to gather data. Here, I outlined a list for the discussion about paid content. Now, I'll outline a starter list of information to collect about a hyperlocal market.
Experience: We'll be grateful for every example you can give of local sites serving a small area (that is, smaller than a city) with basic metrics: size of the market, unique audience, pageviews, kind and mix of advertising and number of advertisers, revenue. We'll also want to know the competitive landscape online: Is there a local weekly? Are there multiple blogs? Bulletin boards and forums?
Content and service: What kind of content, service, and conversation work? What does a local community really need in terms of coverage? How specialized does this get (e.g., mommy blogs)? What services could be needed (e.g., enabling people to schedule meetups and events)? What does a hyperlocal craigslist look like?
Market size: Out of this, we'll want to start developing a picture of the elemental unit of hyperlocal: critical mass sufficient to build a site big enough to succeed. We'll also want to try to get to definitions of local - town, neighborhood, county, group of towns (what do people mean when they say local; what do advertisers mean?).
Present advertising market: How much do local advertisers from the minimarket spend today? What is the proportion of larger advertising in the market attributable to the audience in this market (that is, if a network of hyperlocal sites competed with, say, a newspapers, how much is the potential for each member)?
Potential advertisers: In a given sized market, we'll want to get a census of the possible advertisers: how many by category, whether they advertised before (newspapers, yellow pages, etc.), what they're doing online (web site, Google ads, etc.). The more we can learn about
Advertisers' needs: We will need to talk with local advertisers to find out what their needs are. As I said, they're not going to be met by banners and CPMs. Do they need help on the internet and even with SEO (that was one conclusion of the revenue panel at our conference on New Business Models for News in October)? What other services could a local service or larger network provide?
Network potential: I don't think a lone hyperlocal blogger in a town can reach optimum value with revenue just from that town. It will need to be part of a larger network (this is where it dovetails with the Philadelphia Project)) both to receive revenue from larger advertisers (the BestBuy gambit) and to have the ability to sell hyperlocal advertisers into a larger network (e.g., a store that draws customers from multiple towns).
Other revenue: Are local services finding any other revenue? Selling goods or services? Holding events?
Sales methods: With a finite population of advertisers, newspapers and broadcasters did very little selling (they'll argue with that); they maintained lists. In reaching and serving new advertisers, we need new methods and need to be concerned about scale and efficiency. I've talked a lot about citizen sales. We also need to hear what's working and not: telesales, direct marketing, automated online offerings, etc.
Pricing: What do we know about pricing new models to very small local advertisers?
Contributions: I'm favoring for-profit models but, of course, there are many local services supported by contributions. How much have they been able to get?
The value of volunteering: This is the hardest to calculate but is critical to the local models: People are contributing to the newssphere because they want to, because they care. With help, I'm confident they'll do more. That's part of what we're trying to discover at CUNY in our work with The Local at the New York Times: how communities can be supported to report on themselves. This could be podcasting a school-board meeting or crowdsourcing projects or looking up records. This, like new ad models, will be the subject of some speculative brainstorming. And it will be difficult to put numbers to it. But it's critical.
That all looks large and complicated, but in the end, our work on this model - this strategy - may look as simple as creating optimal scenarios for The Local or a local blog like Baristanet to succeed: maximum revenue from many sources to support maximum coverage.
[I wrote this on a plane ride and have no brain left so I apologize for typos and missing links; I'll followup with those.]
The second edition of the Guardian MediaTalkUSA podcast is up, with On the Media’s Brooke Gladstone and The New York Times’ David Carr having at it, plus interviews with Craig Newmark and Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman, plus news from PaidContent. Enjoy (I hope).
I LOVE this post by Amber Smith adapting the precepts of What Would Google Do? to newspapers.
As long as our industry evolves from newsPAPER to news ORGANIZATION, we’ll survive. And when you think about it, that should be easier for us to do than, say, turn “Dunkin’ Donuts” into a place for great coffee. If Jon Luther can position DD for the future, surely a bunch of passionate journalists can save our profession.
(Well, see the post below about coffee.)
Smith then proceeds to riff on the old and new ways of thinking in news organizations. A few snippets:
Old way of thinking: The newspaper was a product.
New way: News organizations provide a service.
Old way of thinking: Readers became known as “the audience” in the early days of the Internet, describing a one-way relationship wherein readers sat still to observe a performance.
New way: Readers/users are participatory.
Old way of thinking: Newspapers attempted to be all things to all people, serving a mass geographic audience.
New way: News organizations strive to serve a mass of niche communities that already exist, (some geographic, but most based on interests.)
Old way of thinking: Newspapers marketed themselves to a population.
New way: News organizations converse, engage and collaborate with the communities they serve; the population markets the news organization among itself.
Old way of thinking: Newspapers operated in a climate of “scarcity;” news space became tighter when ad sales diminished or the price of newsprint increased.
New way- News organizations have an abundance of space on line. . . .
Old way of thinking: Newspapers that embarked on the Web sought a place to distribute their content.
New way: News organizations see the internet as a 3-D space of reciprocal links. “Every link and every click is a connection, and with every connection, a network is born or grows stronger.” (p. 28) . . .
Old way of thinking: Editors were in charge, choosing which stories to provide to the readers/audience, based on what the editors thought the readers/audience wanted and needed to know.
New way: Readers are in charge. They read what they want, when they want.
Old way of thinking: Newspapers served each reader the same plate of information.
New way: Readers fill their plates with the things they like.
Old way of thinking: Editors decided which beats would be covered.|
New way: “Beats” are based on niche communities that already exist. . . .
Old way of thinking: Newspapers were hesitant to even mention competitors in the newspaper.
New way: News organizations do what they do best and link to the rest, as Jarvis says, and yes, that means even if the link leads to the competition.
Old way of thinking: Soon after the “nut graph” newspaper stories contained a paragraph(s) of background information.
New way: Articles on Web sites link to anything that’s relevant – background information, transcripts that back up interviews, photographs. “On line, content without links is the tree that falls in the forest that nobody hears.” (p. 124)
I could keep quoting and quoting but instead, I’ll urge you to go read her list in full and add your own.
Smith does this in a guest post in Gina Chen’s blog and Gina herself, a few days earlier, also adapted WWGD? to papers with advice on adding value and listening to readers.
We’re fighting for our lives here as an industry. We can’t afford to do anything that doesn’t add value, and figuring out what adds value must be tied to the reader. . .
We forget that we’re a service industry: We’re in the business of helping readers make sense of their world, not of selling them news. And like any business, if we aren’t responsive to our customers, we’ll die.
Starbucks now has a quiet policy of not brewing decaf coffee after noon.
I thought something was odd as Sbux after Sbux had run out of decaf and I go off muttering, ‘How can they run out of coffee? They’re Starbucks.’ Then an honest counterman in Toronto told me about the new policy. I didn’t believe him at first. But after two failed attempts to get decaf this weekend, I asked another employee and was told, yes, it’s a new policy. They will offer to give you a decaf americano (diluted espresso) at the same price. They will even brew decaf if they have to. But you have to wait for that. And don’t believe it when they say “two, two-and-a-half minutes.” I’ve waited five minutes and more. This is passive-aggressive retailing, putting barriers between the customer and what she wants to get your way.
I went to MyStarbucksIdea and found fellow decaffers urging a change in the policy here and here. As my fellow customers point out there, a lot of us cannot drink caf (for me, it’s a medical necessity to avoid it; my wife wonders why I bother). And, by the way, does it make sense to get rid of decaf later in the day, when more people drink it.
Obviously, Starbucks is trying to eke out operating pennies by throwing away less stale decaf coffee and forcing drip customers to one choice. It’s more efficient and Starbucks needs the pennies as its quarterly profit just dropped 77 percent.
But when companies start inconveniencing customers as a business strategy and being sneaky about it, it ends nowhere good. They might as well just give us coupons to Dunkin Donuts and McDonald’s.
My fellow decaffers, please go to MyStarbucksIdea.com and add your voice to the uncaffeinated chorus. We want our decaf.
Forbes quotes AP head Tom Curley sabre-rattling in negotiations with Google: “Curley warned that if Google doesn’t strike the right deal with the AP soon, ‘They will not get our copy going forward.’” This is more than mere negotiation. The AP has been making noise about trying to force Google to favor it and its members in the search engine’s algorithms.
Forbes explains:
The AP, a 163-year-old cooperative owned by news organizations, won’t discuss its talks with Google, but plans to create landing pages and Web-based “news maps” directing users to original AP stories (and away from secondary sources who post material “borrowed” from the AP). To do this, the AP needs Google’s help. Most likely that means Google creating search protocols similar to those created from the licensing deal the AP inked with Google in 2006.
Since that deal was struck, Google has paid the AP undisclosed fees to carry AP content on the Google News section of the site. Search rankings on Google News give priority to recognizable news brands like the AP. But Google applies no such algorithmic discretion to general searches. The broader search rankings spread AP content out across the Web, says Curley, encouraging misappropriation by other sites. Curley wants Google to “protect content from unauthorized use and pay us for the longtail.” By “longtail,” Curley refers to the thousands of small sites that collectively drive vast herds of traffic using AP content.
THe AP is trying to play victim here, saying that Google is pointing to sites that steal its content. Name two. When I search for news, I can’t remember being taken to a thief. I’m often taken to the AP, which rewrites news and cuts the links to original journalism and thus cuts off the value of links. But not reputed thieves.
Now, apparently, the AP wants to start to rectify its role in the link economy by creating these news maps. OK, I’ll agree that there must be more linking directly to journalism at its source. But I don’t know why Google needs the AP to do that. It could improve its algorithms not to favor certain brands but to favor original reporting wherever it occurs, at the AP, at newspapers, or at blogs.
So it’s in the sense that I’ll suggest Google should cancel the AP contract first – not as retribution but as a service to journalism. Now GoogleNews runs full AP stories it licenses from the wire service, taking traffic away from AP members’ sites and pointing to rewrites of reporting rather than original reporting. If what we want is an ethic of linking to original journalism, then Google should consider no longer presenting full AP stories and, for that matter, linking to AP rewrites. That would serve original reporting. But we have to wonder whether serving journalism or the AP is the AP’s real strategy in these negotiations.
Danny Sullivan links us to an explanation of the AP’s tactics at AllThingsD earlier this month:
This has been construed in some quarters as a plan to create a search engine or news portal. But it’s really just an attempt to upgrade the AP’s search engine optimization strategy — that is, trying to get its stuff to show up higher on Google’s (GOOG) search results. It will do that via “search pages,” or “topic pages,” which are par for the course in the Web world….
If the search page plan works, the pages will be generating plenty of page views when people land on them, and it’s possible that the AP will sell ads on that inventory, Kennedy says. But their real function is to shuttle searchers to the original source material from the AP’s members.
So Google could cut out the middleman – the AP – and just link to the original journalism itself. But being bullied into linking to the AP and its members is not the way to go.
Sullivan explains:
Google’s web search quality team — which has nothing to do with Google’s business folks — generally does not take well to people suggesting they’re somehow going to own the search results. AP content probably will start ranking well for some things, but if it started showing up Wikipedia-style for everything, people outside the AP would start complaining about favoritism.
That’s what makes the Forbes piece so puzzling. AP chief executive Tom Curley (who the AP told me was “unavailable” to talk; nor after nearly two hours, does anyone else seem available) sounds naive enough to believe he can force Google into a deal that would give AP preferential treatment in regular search results….
Google News doesn’t give “recognizable news brands” a boost. I’ve never seen them say this, nor have I seen it actually happen in real life. Google News includes large and small news sites and lists a diverse collection of stories. I know lesser-known news sites do well because I run one of those. At times, I can have a headline story that beats the AP or other mainstream outlets in Google News….
Certainly if Google starts ranking brands better than other content, they’ll have issues. Brands do not equal trust. Enron had a brand; AIG has a brand — being a brand doesn’t mean that you are more trustworthy or deserve an automatic ranking boost. From my perspective, Google’s algorithm has continued to change over the past few years to reward trusted sites. Many brands have sites that Google has decided are trustworthy, but some don’t.
Curley is foolish if he thinks he’ll browbeat Google into somehow changing its algorithm in web search to reward AP as part of this deal. Google’s search quality engineers wouldn’t stand for that, any more than a journalist would stand for a newspaper CEO marching into a newsroom and demanding that certain advertisers get favorable stories written about them.
There’s the irony: Journalists would never stand for what the AP is allegedly trying to do on behalf of journalism. If an editor walked into a newsroom and told reporters: ‘I want you all to quote only big-company and government officials from this approved list and stop quoting little people,’ there’d be a proper revolt. Google’s engineers will protect the authority of their algorithm just as self-respecting journalists would protect their own independence and reputation.
So, Google: Resist the bullying and blackmail. Drop the AP. Perfect ways to link to and thus support journalism at its source. That is the better service to the public and news.
(Full disclosure: I’m a partner at another aggregator, Daylife. As I’ve blogged before, I’ve discussed both there and at GoogleNews the need to link to and thus support journalism at its source, wherever it occurs.)
: LATER: In the comments, Paul Colford of the AP corrects me:
AP sells only a selection of its staff-generated international and national news stories to Google and other commercial customers. A very small slice of this — less than 2 percent of the mix — comes from member newspapers, typically scoops that are credited to the papers.
Stories from member newspapers make up a much larger piece of AP’s state wires — but the state wires are not available to Google and others outside the AP membership.
I stand corrected. But then I would also say that the AP now has an unfair advantage over its members by selling its content to Google to distribute in full. Google does this only for wire services, not for anyone else. And I don’t want it to do this for others, because someone will get left out of the mix. So I still think Google should link instead, and link directly to original journalism.
Warren Buffett would not buy newspapers “at any price.” From Paidcontent, he said (according to Fox Business):
The current environment is accentuating problem in newspapers -but it’s not the basic cause. Charlie and I read five a day. We’ll never give them up. We would not buy them at any price. They have the possibility of going to unending losses. They were essential to the public 20 years ago. Their pricing power was essential with customer. They lost the essential nature. The erosion has accelerated dramatically. They were only essential to advertiser as long as essential to reader. No one liked buying ads in the paper – it’s just that they worked. I don’t see anything on the horizon that causes that erosion to end.
This from the owner of the Buffalo News and a board member of the Washington Post Company.
And they call me a doomsayer.
Now add to this what Jeffrey Cole of USC said in his latest valuable report:
We’re clearly now seeing a path to the end of the printed daily newspapers — a trend that is escalating much faster than we had anticipated,” Cole said. “The decline of newspapers is happening at a pace they never could have anticipated. Their cushion is gone, and only those papers that can move decisively to the Web will survive.
I wondered whether Vanishing Newspaper author Philip Meyer — who’s often quoted as predicting the last paper rolling off a press in 2043 (though as you’ll see, that’s not quite right) — had updated his prognostication. Last year, he wrote this:
Judging by the Google alerts the book’s title has accumulated since then, readers took away the wrong message.
This reference from The Economist is typical: “In his book ‘The Vanishing Newspaper,’ Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition.”
That’s a clever image, and it is true that extrapolating the recent linear decline in everyday readership would show a zero point in April 2043. But newspaper publishers are not so relentlessly stubborn that we can expect them to continue churning out papers until there is only one reader left. The industry would lose critical mass and collapse long before then.
Moreover, straight-line trends do not continue indefinitely. Nature throws us curves.
His superb piece was written probably just before last fall’s crash — one helluva curve.
Add this all up and it keeps getting clearer and clearer: It makes less sense every day to try to preserve and protect – to invest in – what is obviously a failing model. Every day that papers keep printing is a day that they haven’t reinvented themselves for a new reality.
The same can be said of the auto industry, retail, banking, education, and many other sectors of society. But those will be the subjects of upcoming posts (and maybe more).
This isn’t doomsaying, though. It is a reality check. It is nothing more than observing what is obviously and inexorably happening in the economy and society. The insane response to this change is to resist it and mourn it. The sane response is to find the opportunity in it.
Don’t bail. Build.
It may be too late for newspapers to find that opportunity. But others will find it. That’s not doomsaying. That’s optimism.
: LATER: I find it interesting – that’s all – that Romenesko’s angle on the Buffett quote was partner Charlie Munger’s lament that the erosion of papers is tragic. For me, that’s the color. For him, Buffett’s tarring of newspaper investment is that addendum.
I think I like being used in an offhand reference without further identification for a gag lead in this LA Times review of three books about the web:
When the history of the Web is written, in what form will our progeny receive it? Via grainy promotional YouTube videos from Google? By listening to dusty Jeff Jarvis podcasts? Perhaps annotated, crowd-sourced and pre-preferenced Wikistories will be delivered directly into their cerebrums. (Personally, I’m hoping for a tiny avatar of a young woman in a flowing white gown and side-buns, interrupted midway by gunfire.) Yet whatever the medium, it seems unlikely that it will be the one that’s falling out of favor even as you read this: the plain old book.
This comes from Mark Bauerlein, a professor at Emory writing at the Chronicle of Higher Education:
If we believe that the newspaper is a fundamental institution of civic engagement and a healthy democracy, colleges should envision the resurrection of newspaper reading as an element of their civic mission. Many colleges and universities have created civic engagement units of their own, and perhaps they should consider a subscription initiative for all entering students.
And this comes from Ben Williams, a student up the road writing at the Massachusetts Daily Collegian about the Boston Globe facing the grim reaper nose-to-nose:
The Globe’s being on the brink of failure is not a bad thing either; it is a necessary thing. Like the ghost of Christmas future, sometimes a cold, stony grave needs to be laid out before someone’s ways are changed.
Why don’t you two get together for coffee so the student can teach the teacher. Why should universities tie themselves to the past? Why should they go against the flow? They should listen to their students and see that they’re on the internet and help them find news there. But I doubt the students are the ones who need the help.
