NY Times: Facebook to Offer Free Classifieds. Facebook, the social networking Web site, is adding free classified ad listings, putting it into competition with dozens of established companies like Craigslist and many newspapers.
It’s too simplistic to say it’s yet another nail in newspapers’ coffins. What’s notable is that in a sense everyone can offer classifieds [...]
Mark Glaser (MediaShift): Hyper-Local Citizen Media Sites Learn How to Serve Small Communities.
At NewAssignment.net, John McQuaid looks incredulously into the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s decision to turn top-notch columnist James Lileks into a street reporter. We need all the street reporting we can get, but this is nuts. Quote:
The Star Tribune’s decision to eliminate James Lileks’s column and reassign him to a beat as a local reporter is so [...]
(This posting appeared today in the Washington Examiner newspaper.)
In this impossibly early presidential campaign season, so-called “debates” are already making modest waves. They could be much more useful, and there’s promising progress to suggest that they will.
On May 5, we learned of one potential bit of progress. CNN announced that, after the broadcast of an [...]
Jay Rosen offers “Assignment Zero, Updated. With Initial Results”.
On the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the publisher of the largest daily newspaper in Arkansas writes:
One has to wonder how many of the newspaper industry’s current problems are self-inflicted. Take free news. News has become ubiquitous, free, and as a result, a commodity. Anytime you are trying to sell something that becomes [...]
CNN: The presidential debates are an integral part of our system of government, in which the American people have the opportunity to make informed choices about who will serve them. Therefore, CNN debate coverage will be made available without restrictions at the conclusion of each live debate.
Unlike the greedy executives at NBC, who have slapped [...]
Glenn Greenwald (Salon): Who funds and runs the Politico? So the President and CEO of The Politico worked in multiple positions in the Reagan White House, and was continuously promoted until he rose to the level of Assistant to the President. And his close connection to the Reagan family and the Reagan presidency continues through [...]
From BarackObama.com, an
open letter to Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Howard Dean urging the DNC to make the video from any Democratic Presidential debate publicly available after the debate for free and without restriction.
All well and good, and a step forward.
But why doesn’t Obama go the next step, and decline to participate in [...]
The rumors are flying fast and furious (see Techmeme for a sampling). This is a logical deal, yet a potentially foolish one.
It’s logical because the two companies have been whacked by Google in the online advertising and search space, and combined they offer fairly complementary services. The world needs a solid non-Google choice, because Google [...]