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 …
This paper, a study of the effect of the closure of the Cincinnati Post on elections, got a good ride in the metamedia blogosphere a few weeks back when it came out, but I just got around to reading it. Interesting stuff, and you can see why it was popular with we inkstained scribes: The …
Last Sunday night, I read an excellent New York Times story via the Web about Steven Chu’s introduction to the ways of Washington. I cover the Department of Energy at my day job, and the DOE is a major employer in New Mexico, so I made a note of the story to include a link …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: How Important is Andy Revkin’s Blog?’ »
There is a line to be drawn, it seems to me, connecting the events of the George Will affair and my elephant diaries (the series of posts in which I try to sort out the past and future of my industry). In short summary, the affair illustrates both the way new information ecosystems have developed …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: Connecting the Dots on the George Will Affair’ »