NYTimes Prefers Silly to Serious
The New York Times does a lot of things right online. Multimedia, lists of what stories are being searched, e-mailed, blogged. It also does a lot of things wrong, like the Times Select paywall, but chief among them is it's refusal to "pollute" the purity of the Grey Lady with outside links. This arrogance is, of course, a product of the archaic "All the News That's Fit to Print" mindset. If it's not in the Times, it's not worth knowing.
The absurdity of this thinking was revealed last week when Tom Friedman wrote a column in response to a letter from GM having to do with his thinking on global warming. Of course, this being the Times, there was no link to the letter, so you're reading the column in the dark.
Today, the flip-side of the no outside links policy is even more silly. The Times forces intrasite links inside its story to pages summarizing the paper's coverage. So, in it's piece on the Warren Buffet's boffo donations, where it refers to him as the Oracle of Omaha? You guessed it, Oracle is hot-linked to a page of Times coverage of the Redwood City software maker.
That just makes the Times look silly.
Monday, June 26, 2006
Monday, June 12, 2006
The need to keep growing will make you do funny things
If MySpacers were in career advancement mode when on the site, there wouldn't be articles like this.
If MySpacers were in career advancement mode when on the site, there wouldn't be articles like this.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Why the Times needs to be less Select(ive)...and more inclusive
Tim Porter makes a strong case in defense of the Times Select program to monetize the NYT's popular columnists after PBS's Mark Glaser called for its end, but ultimately, I think he's wrong. As a former newspaperman, I can empathize with the desire to get paid for the value you provide your readers. (And here Porter is right to point out that commodity news should be free). But you don't have to drink the Koolaid to believe that the Web is truly disruptive.
How so?
Not long ago, the measure of a columnist's authority was where they were published. Simply put, as smart as they are and hard as they worked to get there, readers understood that columnists were worth paying attention to because they were in the Times. But it's also true that not that long ago there was little or no direct interaction between a columnist and his audience. Before e-mail, letters to the editor ran several days after the fact and, as such, were largely moot points. Discussion of their work was mostly limited to the office water cooler.
And now?
Authority comes not from being exclusive, but from being ubiquitous, from being linkable, from being part of the frey. How else to explain the rise of political blogs like Daily Kos and Instapundit. To many of their readers, their opinion matters as much or more than Dowd, Friedman et. al. But of course, the Times is still the Times and Maureen Dowd is worth paying for. So that's why the Times is making a nice piece of change on the move. That's the problem. It's so profitable that it will be hard for them to go back even when it becomes painfully obvious that Times columnists are not leading national discussions the way they were pre-Times Select. I fear it's already getting there.
And lets not forget...when you read the rest of the Times or any similar site, the news is not "free." It comes at the cost of your attention which is sold in the form of ads.
Tim Porter makes a strong case in defense of the Times Select program to monetize the NYT's popular columnists after PBS's Mark Glaser called for its end, but ultimately, I think he's wrong. As a former newspaperman, I can empathize with the desire to get paid for the value you provide your readers. (And here Porter is right to point out that commodity news should be free). But you don't have to drink the Koolaid to believe that the Web is truly disruptive.
How so?
Not long ago, the measure of a columnist's authority was where they were published. Simply put, as smart as they are and hard as they worked to get there, readers understood that columnists were worth paying attention to because they were in the Times. But it's also true that not that long ago there was little or no direct interaction between a columnist and his audience. Before e-mail, letters to the editor ran several days after the fact and, as such, were largely moot points. Discussion of their work was mostly limited to the office water cooler.
And now?
Authority comes not from being exclusive, but from being ubiquitous, from being linkable, from being part of the frey. How else to explain the rise of political blogs like Daily Kos and Instapundit. To many of their readers, their opinion matters as much or more than Dowd, Friedman et. al. But of course, the Times is still the Times and Maureen Dowd is worth paying for. So that's why the Times is making a nice piece of change on the move. That's the problem. It's so profitable that it will be hard for them to go back even when it becomes painfully obvious that Times columnists are not leading national discussions the way they were pre-Times Select. I fear it's already getting there.
And lets not forget...when you read the rest of the Times or any similar site, the news is not "free." It comes at the cost of your attention which is sold in the form of ads.
Monday, June 05, 2006
Apples to Apples Please!
OK, this is a bit stale now, but can bloggers (even smart ones) and the MSM alike please stop parroting Ryan Seacrest in telling us that there were more votes cast in the American Idol finale than any U.S. president has ever received? Comparing total votes cast to the number of votes for a single candidate is not the same. On American Idol, you can vote multiple times, from the comfort of your home, and you don't have to be 18. Oh, and convicts and non-citizens can vote too. Now I despair over the state of American Democracy just as much as the next guy, but American Idol isn't the reason.
OK, this is a bit stale now, but can bloggers (even smart ones) and the MSM alike please stop parroting Ryan Seacrest in telling us that there were more votes cast in the American Idol finale than any U.S. president has ever received? Comparing total votes cast to the number of votes for a single candidate is not the same. On American Idol, you can vote multiple times, from the comfort of your home, and you don't have to be 18. Oh, and convicts and non-citizens can vote too. Now I despair over the state of American Democracy just as much as the next guy, but American Idol isn't the reason.
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