Quotable: August 2007 Archives
But get this straight: Just because a site has 100 million users, that doesn't mean 100 million people see your ad. It's not TV. Repeat: It's not TV. The only people who will see your ad are the ones who see the page on which it appears. If you buy 10,000 impressions, aka eyeballs, you can buy them on a big site or a bunch of small sites, it doesn't matter. Big brings no advantage other than convenience and it also brings some disadvantages like inefficiency and price. This is the essence of the change in the economic model of media. Post that on your wall and stare at it.-- Jeff Jarvis
Is's almost comical how so few people get this.
Stop calling everything "content". It's a bullshit word that the dot-commers started using back in the '90s as a wrapper for everything that could be digitized and put online. It's handy, but it masks and insults the true natures* of writing, journalism, photography, and the rest of what we still, blessedly (if adjectivally) call "editorial". Your job is journalism, not container cargo.
-- Doc Searls (on advice to newspapers)
It’s like the web has now moved so close to reality now that we want reality to be more web-like.
-- Angela A. Thomas, who teaches English education and is the author of Youth Online: Identity and Literacy in the Digital Age
In Second Life, she is known as Anya Ixchel and teaches and conduct auto-ethnographic research
Tags: web reality
"Those of us who care ought to be trying to make sure we create ways -- and technologies -- for ethical editors to maintain control of the content they are in charge of producing. Interactivity is a fabulous tool or it's a catastrophic threat and a weapon of media credibility destruction. It’s our choice."
-- Alan Horton, former senior vice president for newspapers at The E. W. Scripps Company and now chairman of the Scripps Howard Foundation, quoted in Editor and Publisher.
Bonus quote:
E.W. Scripps, the most cost-conscious businessman of his time--rivaled in our own only by Sam Walton--pinched wheat pennies until they floured. But even Scripps knew that the newspaper publisher
"who starts out to build up a circulation by canvassing for subscribers generally bankrupts himself before he discovers a fundamental truth concerning our business--which is that a successful newspaper must depend entirely upon its quality for its custom, and not at all upon slick solicitors."
(from the same Editor and Publisher article)
Tags: newspapers | jounrnalism
Another voice on the state of newspaper content
The real problem, Mr. Newspaperman, isn't that your content isn't online or isn't online with multimedia. It's your content. Specifically, it's what you report, which stories you publish, and how you publish them to people, who, by the way, have very different individual interests. The problem is the content you're giving them, stupid; not the platform its on.
Do we see a pattern?
Tags: Vin Crosbie | newspapers | transformation
Designer extraordinaire Roger Black has designed, helped design or influenced the design of many of the newspapers, magazines and Web sites we use daily. In a blog post yesterday, he has some chilling words for newspaper managers:
Newspapers will not pull out of this mortal glidepath until they get a lot more interesting. This is something that Rupert (Murdoch) has understood, presumably from birth. His attitude has always been to damn the institutions and give people what they like. This is what worked for Hearst and Pulitizer, and for Paley and Sarnoff. But today the traditional media polar bears (in newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, music, movies and books) seldom blame the product for their shrinking habitat.
Many bemoan the media baron Rupert Murdoch's purchase of The Wall Street Journal; not Black: "Murdoch is its best hope. And, if anyone can turn around the news business, he can."
(It is also interesting to read the "about" stuff on Black's Web site. He explains, among other things, how he transformed his own business into a more nimble, flexible and lower-cost organization. He might have a few lessons for his clients there.)
Tags: Roger Black | Rupert Murdoch | transformation
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