December 12th, 2008
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In a week when Pulitzer Prize expanded its eligibility to include online only news websites, Tribune Co (which owns Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times) filed for bankruptcy, and The New York Times Company announced its plans to borrow up to $225 million against its mid-Manhattan headquarters building to ease a potential cash flow squeeze, it isn’t surprising to see discussions about the death of the newspaper.
(Update: Ashish Sinha writes that the Indian newspapers are also in trouble.)
Clay Shirky at Boing Boing blames the newspapers for not seeing the writing on the wall –
By the turn of the century, anyone who didn’t understand that the business model for newspapers was a wasting asset was caught up in nothing other than willful ignorance, so secure in their faith in the permanence of their business that they assumed that those glaciers would politely swerve at the last minute, which minute is looking increasingly like now.
Virginia Heffernan in NYT asks journalists to embrace the change –
December 12th, 2008 |
Posted in Internet, Media
| Tagged with Chicago Tribune, Clay Shirky, Jeff-Jarvis, Los Angeles Times, Mitch Joel, New-York-Times, Newspaper, Pulitzer Prize, Virginia Heffernan |
August 18th, 2008
The discussion on social media introverts started by Pete Cashmore at Mashable reminded me of two other discussion threads on online social dynamics that I had bookmarked but not writen about.
The first discussion thread was started by Will Wilkinson who argued that it is possible to opt out of the status rat race by re-interpreting what status is –
The argument for the politics of relative position is at bottom an argument about the limits of human freedom. We are, it is alleged, locked into the rat race by the relentless engine of our evolved status-hungry nature. And we are, it is argued, almost helpless to reinterpret the context, the frame of reference, within which we evaluate our own choices. But the unique human cultural capacity—equally a part of our biology—liberates us.
Where benevolence, fidelity, cooperation, innovation, and excellence are esteemed, positional races may produce mutual advantage instead of mutual destruction. And while the game of status may be locally zero-sum, it can be globally positive-sum, as scientific, economic, and cultural entrepreneurs identify new dimensions of excellence in which to compete and earn freely conferred prestige as payment for benefit to others. We are not destined to want fancier cars, bigger houses, and more upscale outfits, nor are we helpless to feel diminished by those who out-consume us. We can opt out by opting in to competing narratives about the composition of a good life. And we do it all the time.
August 18th, 2008 |
Posted in Culture, Social Media
| Tagged with Clay Shirky, Danah Boyd, Digital Youth Group, Fameball, Henry Farell, Micro-fame, New York Magazine, Rex Sorgatz, Status, Timothy Lee, Will Wilkinson |
