An optimist about newspapers
I sent away for a copy of the Charlie Rose interview with Anthony O'Reilly that I mentioned in my earlier post. Here is the relevant passage. Rose is asking O'Reilly, a former CEO of the Heinz company and now a prominent global financier, why he's willing to invest in deadtree publications at a time when the Internet is all the rage:
ANTHONY O'REILLY: My view is that with the
Internet and the proliferation and the ubiquity of the Internet,
newspapers, if they had not been invented, would have had to be invented
because of the Internet.
Because in my view, a newspaper, properly edited and presented
newspaper, is the ultimate browser. In a half an hour, you can get all the
news, all the views, all the sport, all the gossip, all the commentary from
people you trust or dislike or like, and you get it all for the price of a
cup of coffee.
CHARLIE ROSE: And you do your own search.
SIR ANTHONY O`REILLY: Absolutely. Whereas, if you go on the
Internet, you have look for something. You`re looking for something.
CHARLIE ROSE: But why are American newspapers hurting?
SIR ANTHONY O`REILLY: Well, I think that certain events happened in
American newspapers over the past two or three years. There were some
scandals involved in relation to the ABC circulation.
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
SIR ANTHONY O`REILLY: Most newspapers wanted to clean up the act and
to say this actually is a circulation that we have. And so many of the
fees that they gave away and many of the contortions that they used to
increase their circulation have been done away with.
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
SIR ANTHONY O`REILLY: And so papers are now coming back to the
bedrock of their actual circulation.
But I would think that the actual circulation decline of the
newspapers has been relatively nominal, and worldwide, newspapers are
actually on the increase. In India, for example, we are showing a 25
percent increase in our newspaper...
CHARLIE ROSE: But I point out something you know. They`re developing
at a rapid rate an increased middle class in India.
SIR ANTHONY O`REILLY: That`s correct. And those people believe that
newspapers, to them, are, as I said, the ultimate browser.
Users more engaged with smaller communities
A new report put out by Communispace states that the social networking sites of tomorrow will cater to smaller audiences.
Buh-bye, MySpace.
BizReport: Users are more engaged with smaller communities
Print Media Makes Its Transition to the Web-Video Age -- New York Magazine
Print Media Makes Its Transition to the Web-Video Age -- New York Magazine:
"And this very moment, before anyone professes to know much more than anyone else, is probably the beginning of the new medium’s great golden age. Enjoy it while it lasts. "
I'm not really sure I get Anderson's kicker. Is he saying that there will come a time when all Web videos will have high production values? The Buchwald obit he mentions certainly does. But is it safe to say that all online vids will be like this? The low production values are part of the aesthetic, not
just a question of necessity, right?
Everybody is doing it
Reuters reporter Adam Pasick does it. CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman does it. Journalist James Wagner Au does it. Even Marco Cadioli, a photographer and college lecturer from Milan, Italy, does it.
It seems everyone does it.
What is it? "Second Life," the online virtual universe (or "metaverse") program. While one of our classmates is the perpetual pooh-pooher of Second Life, some pretty important people are taking note according this Feb. 13
"Shop Talk" column in Editor & Publisher.
About once a week, Terdiman's avatar GreeterDan Godel hosts interviews in CNET's virtual theater with prominent people from both the real world and within the program. Subjects have included Philip Rosedale, the CEO of Linden Lab, the program developer, and DigiBarn's Bruce Damer, who is a historian of virtual worlds. A recent interview featured the chief gaming officer of Fortune 500 company Sun Microsystems.
Legions of blogs and websites devoted to the metaverse have sprung up, including the leading blog
New World Notes. The site is run by Au. He had spent three years serving as Linden's official "embedded" journalist within Second Life, but his site is now affiliated with Federated Media Publishing, which runs the popular site Boing Boing.
The program also has its own newspaper, The Second Life Herald. Within Second Life, users can click on a kiosk to bring up the publication's website, which is funded by advertising just like most other content websites. A would-be rival, The Democrat, which sought to provide in-world content through the program's "notecard" feature, folded in early November after a four-month run.
So like it or not, we may all be pulled into 3D journalism someday.
What Can We Expect?
Hopefully we’ve all been keeping up with our Poynter readings from the “Writing for Convergent Media” course…I know I haven’t.
But, I’m trying to rectify that. In doing so, I came across this
item from Sunday. It provides a good synthesis, in general, of what types of jobs in journalism that we might expect. I think that I like the “editor-host” model, though I’m not sure that I could sit behind a desk and computer all day—I do that already. :-)
Ken C.
Newspapers: The Ideal Browser?
Channel surfing after getting home late from work the other night, I happened onto a Charlie Rose interview with Tony O'Reilly.
He an Irish-Brit who formerly headed an American company (Heinz) and who now is investing in the media, among other things. You can find out more about him and his company here.
Annoyingly, I can't find a copy of the video on the web or on Charlie Rose's website (a definite candidate for Vincent Flanders list.
What interested me was O'Reilly's rationale for investing in newspapers even in an Internet age. O'Reilly said something to the effect that some of the heaviest Internet usage is also in countries with the heaviest newspaper readership: Japan and one of the Scandinavian nations -- maybe Norway -- were two he mentioned.
This may be a commentary on those countries lack of entertainment options :-).
But O'Reilly thinks newspapers and the 'net go hand-in-hand. Internet users like papers because good old edited ink on paper turns out to be "the ideal browser." Or so says one megabucks investor.
Hope everyone had happy holidays!
Kathy K
Is Your Blog Exposing You to Legal Liability?
That's the question posed in this Law.com
article.
Author and lawyer Lawrence Savell looks at issues including defamation, copyright and trademark.
"Blog operators need to be alert for situations possibly raising liability issues. Use common sense, use appropriate disclaimers and, if you are not a lawyer, consider legal review. Check your insurance policies to determine if your risks may be covered," Savell recommends.
-- Mark H.
