I’d like to think the President of the United States has the best interests of America’s children in mind with this school address thing that has generated such a kerfuffle. But after reading the advance text, I’m not so sure: Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: Career Advice From The President’ »
One of the great advantages of the web for us on the content-creation side is the information web users give us, via their clicks, about their preferences. Usually I am not surprised (salacious crime, etc.). But if you had asked me if my little squib about El Nino’s arrival (sub. req. maybe sorta) would be …
The New York Times story about hyperlocal news offers a reminder of the mistake we’ve been making in the news biz: And so far, they have had only limited success selling ads. Remember the railroad metaphor. The discussion suggests the continued mistake of thinking we’re in the news business. We’ve been extraordinarily successful in delivering …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: What Business Are We In?’ »
Via a tweet from Janet Stemwedel yesterday, a brilliant new business model has emerged. Here’s what she said: @jfleck Did you not get the memo? The internet is killing print media. (And, I presume, making it harder to wrap fish and line cages.) We’ve beent thinking about this all wrong. We’ve been mistakenly thinking we …
I did a kinda snarky, mean-spirited post last week criticicizing local politics blogger Joe Monahan. The guy bugs me because what he does seems, to many readers, to pass for new journalism. He’s an entertaining blogger, but his obsessive use of anonymous sources falls far short of what for me serves as useful journalism. Matt …
I have a standing policy here at the Inkstain News Center against quoting anonymous sources, but this is too sweet to pass up: My alligators tell me that Joe Monahan’s college nickname was “Squid”. “Alligators” is NM politics blogger Monahan’s word for his anonymous sources, who tell him all kinds of important stuff, some of …
Regular readers will have noticed that I’m a fan of David Zetland, the water economist. He has a great blog that is widely read in the water wonk community. Reading it has helped me a great deal in understanding some key economic principles that underly water issues I follow. But there’s a problem. A guy …
From today’s NYTimes article about the San Francisco Chronicle: The Chronicle’s Web site, SFGate.com, draws an unusually large audience for a paper its size, three million to four million people monthly, according to Nielsen Online, but generates a fraction of the paper’s revenue. If serving readers on the Internet is your measure, the Chronicle has …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: Why solving “the Web problem” does not solve the problem’ »
One of the occupational hazards of being a journalist (at least the way I do it) is an embarassing lack of original ideas. My job is to entertain, understand, sort and pass judgment on the ideas of others, then explain the ones that meet some sort of preliminary test of usefulness and/or relevance. Ideas of …