Posts from ‘December, 2006’

Over at Slate, Jack Shafer shreds the Wall Street Journal’s self-serving description of its own downsizing. Quote: It’s the rare amputee who describes himself as better off without his two big toes than with them, but that’s what Wall Street Journal Publisher L. Gordon Crovitz attempts today in a “Letter From the Publisher” on the […]

UPDATED The rise of the citizen journalist is not a new phenomenon. People have been witnessing and taking pictures of notable events for a long, long time. And they’ve been selling them to traditional news organizations just as long. But professional photojournalists, and more recently videographers, have continued to make good livings at a craft […]

UPDATED Running the latest version of Firefox is a huge drag — repeated freezes that require a forced shutdown of the application on my MacBook Pro. Growing pains for the Mozilla folks or just sloppy coding? Update: I should have been clearer, as commenters are noting, that the sloppy coding, if it exists, could easily […]

NY Times: Open-Source Spying. For the intelligence agencies to benefit from “social software,” he said, they need to persuade thousands of employees to begin blogging and creating wikis all at once. And that requires a cultural sea change: persuading analysts, who for years have survived by holding their cards tightly to their chests, to begin […]

American Journalism Review: Blogging Between the Lines. The mainstream media have fallen in love with blogs, launching them on everything from politics to life in Las Vegas to bowling. But does the inherent tension between the blogosphere’s anything-goes ethos and the standards of traditional journalism mean this relationship is doomed? Well, it took only, what, […]

East Bay Express: No reporters, no news?. (A)ll union editorial employees at the San Jose Mercury News have been ordered to not come to work on December 5 between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. Merc management told the reporters and photogs earlier this week that they should remain at home, waiting by their phones for […]

Mark Cuban: The Google Brilliance applied to Newspapers and Local Media. You might not be as efficient in monetization as Google, but most of your customers will never know the difference. All they will know is that you have earned their trust as the company that handles all their advertising and website ad publishing needs […]

Mark Potts: Rolling a Hand Grenade Down the Hall. Let’s roll a hand grenade down the hall. Let’s try blowing up the very concept of a metro newspaper and thinking about it in an entirely new form. Instead of a big, one-size-fits-all newspaper/Web site, let’s reimagine the local news product as a group of much […]