Sunday, May 30, 2010

German musem show hopes to include "polar cities" exhibit in next exhibition in 2011



When Hamburg-based Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (Museum for Arts and Crafts) in Germany decided to curate a show about "Climate Capsules" they inadvertently forgot to include polar cities as part of the show. Too bad, because they missed a good chance to show the work of Taiwanese artist Deng Cheng-hong to the world. He is the first person on Earth to come up with designs for polar cities for future survivors of global warming, and Dr James Lovelock of the UK has seen Deng's image and said "Bravo!"

Lovelock gets it. In fact, Lovelock is the father of polar cities.


"What to Do When the Earth Warms Up?" is a good question, and the German media asks that question in writing a story about the new show this summer of 2010.

"Given humankind's lackadaisical response to climate change, a museum in Hamburg is presenting fanciful visions of how humans might adapt to disaster. "Climate Capsules," an exhibition starting Friday, imagines people of the future in oceangoing cities and other artificial, self-contained environmentsm" the report notes. Sadly, the curator neglected to include any images of polar cities in the show. Maybe next time?

"Headlines about the changing climate are more plentiful than political moves to slow it. Among those assuming that bleak predictions will become real is the Hamburg-based Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (Museum for Arts and Crafts). Its Climate Capsules exhibition, which opened today, asks how people can survive in a heating globe," the German media opined.


"Organizers collected a range of bold, sometimes zany, approaches to the threat of an increasingly inhospitable world. Curator Friedrich von Borries points out that, amid all the debate about climate change, there has been little talk of solutions. The focus instead is firmly on slowing or stopping the temperature trend, even though much damage has already been done."

"In the search for alternative solutions, there is a category discussed substantially less often in public: adaptation," the musuem wrote in a press release. Aha! The dreaded A-word! Yes, adaptation. Which is exactly what polar cities are all about, and why the museum will hopefully do a show in the future on polar cities, too.

In ''Climate Capsules'', artists, designers and architects have dreamt up science-fiction-style solutions. Sadly, the show does not include the pioneering work and images of Deng Cheng-hong and his project collaborator Daniel Halevi Bloom.

Climate Capsules - What to Do When the Earth Warms Up?

Given humankind's lackadaisical response to climate change, a museum in Hamburg is presenting fanciful visions of how humans might adapt to disaster.

"Climate Capsules" imagines people of the future in oceangoing cities and other artificial, self-contained environments, including POLAR CITIES (http://pcillu101.blogspot.com/
). And don't forget Underground Desert Living Units - UDLU, created by Reynard Loki http://www.udlu.org/


Headlines about the changing climate are more plentiful than political moves to slow it. Among those assuming that bleak predictions will become real is the Hamburg-based Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (Museum for Arts and Crafts). Its Climate Capsules exhibition asks how people can survive in a warming globe.

http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-55322-7.html



Organizers collected a range of bold, sometimes zany, approaches to the threat of an increasingly inhospitable world. Curator Friedrich von Borries points out that, amid all the debate about climate change, there has been little talk of solutions. The focus instead is firmly on slowing or stopping the temperature trend, even though much damage has already been done.

"In the search for alternative solutions, there is a category discussed substantially less often in public: adaptation," the musuem writes in a press release.

In Climate Capsules, artists, designers and architects have dreamt up science-fiction-style solutions. Architect Vincent Callebaut, for example, takes escapism to an extreme with his plan for a floating city called Lilypad, which would take to the ocean as a haven for climate refugees.

Other ideas on show are not as modern as they look: In 1960 Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao drew up their utopian "Dome over Manhattan," an idea for a two-mile-diameter glass dome over Midtown that would control living temperatures for New Yorkers in both summer and winter.

Fake Clouds


The Hamburg show also explores the idea of chemical and physical interventions to moderate weather. Among the dramatic plans featured is the US Army's Project Cirrus, an experiment in 1947 to weaken a Caribbean hurricane by "seeding" its clouds. There are also low-key proposals, like painting roofs and streets with reflective white paint to reduce global warming.

Artists in this exhibition suggest that humans may have to grow more cut off from their environment than they are today. The show starts with an unusual installation by Paris-based artist Pablo Reinoso. Two visitors at a time can poke their heads into his inflatable textile construction, sharing the air they breathe in the enclosed pod-like space.

Ilkka Halso's photo series, "Museum of Nature," is similarly striking. Her digital montages relocate forests, lakes and rivers into imaginary museum buildings, transforming everyday wildlife into exotic museum exhibits.

Deng Cheng-hong of Taiwan, whose images of Polar Cities and part of Dan Bloom's Polar Cities Project, were not on display, but might be in the future.



http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,697394,00.html

James Lovelock's PLEA FOR A BIGGER UK NAVY in Britain TO KEEP OUT CLIMATE Refugees when the shit hits the fan and millions line up to get into Polar Cities in northern Europe and Canada

Starvation could follow if Britain's shores are not protected. Read Hamish MacDonald's FINITUDE for a fictional treatment of all this.

May 31,2010
By John Ingham

BRITAIN needs a bigger Navy to stave off mass immigration caused by climate change, James Lovelock claimed yesterday.


Starvation could ­follow if Britain’s shores are not protected, he said.

Dr Lovelock, 90, said that as the world population rises, ­climate change would trigger mass immigration north AS PEOPLE LINE UP TO GET INTO POLAR CITIES IN THE NORTH. - See: - http://pcillu101.blogspot.com

And Britain would be seen as a “liferaft” or Lifeboat Britain on to which the dispossessed would scramble.

The moderating effect of the surrounding seas may help us escape the worst effects of ­climate change, he said.

Dr Lovelock, who in the 1960s invented the Gaia theory that the Earth is a self-regulating entity, said mass migration was already under way.

At the Hay Festival of Literature in Herefordshire he said: “Do you know that Italy now has a larger navy than we do and it is to keep immigrants from Africa out?

“We are a bit of a liferaft but there is only a ­limited number of people that this island can support.” Dr Lovelock, a pat­ron of the Optimum Population Trust which campaigns for a gradual global population decrease, said that with 60 million people Britain may already be at its optimum size.

“So what are we going to do?” he said. “The people who are going to come here are going to starve and so are we – a larger Navy may be the answer.”

The Royal Navy is facing cuts in the Strategic Defence Review. One senior officer told the Daily Express that meeting its current commitments was already an “awesome challenge”. The scale of migration was revealed last week by official figures showing that 203,000 foreigners were given a UK passport last year – one every three minutes.

Campaign group MigrationWatch estimates annual migration to the UK quadrupled to 230,000 between 1997 and 2007. It says there may be 1.1 million illegal immigrants here. And it predicts that at current rates immigration will add seven million to the UK population by 2034.


Dr Lovelock urged the audience to grow their own food and conserve more. He said: “Good gardening produces four times as much food per acre as farming does. That was something they found out in the Second World War.”

New Zealand faces the sames issues as the UK on this, so watch out Lifeboat New Zealand and Lifeboat Tasmania and Lifeboat Alaska!

Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader ......By VERLYN KLINKENBORG, New York Times: OR WHY READING ON SCREENS IS NOT READIND BUT A NEW MODE OF HUMAN READING, WAY INFERIOR TO PAPER READING, CALLED SCREENING

I have been
reading a lot on my iPad recently, and I have some complaints — not
about the iPad but about the state of digital reading generally.
Reading is a subtle thing, and its subtleties are artifacts of a
venerable medium: words printed in ink on paper. Glass and pixels
aren’t the same.

When I read a physical book, I don’t have to look anywhere else to
find out how far I’ve gotten. The iPad e-reader, iBooks, tries to
create the illusion of a physical book. The pages seem to turn, and I
can see the edges of those that remain. But it’s fake. There are
always exactly six unturned pages,
no matter where I am in the book.

Now, a larger problem. Books in their digital format look vastly less
“finished,” less genuine. And we can vary their font and type size,
making them resemble all the more our own word-processed manuscripts.
Your poems — no matter how wretched or wonderful they are — will never
look as good as Robert Hass’s poems in the print edition of “The Apple
Trees at Olema.” But your poems can look almost exactly as ugly — as
e-book-like — as the Kindle version of that collection.

All the e-books I’ve read have been ugly — books by Chang-rae Lee,
Alvin Kernan, Stieg Larsson — though the texts have been wonderful.
But I didn’t grow up reading texts. I grew up reading books. The
difference is important.

When it comes to digital editions, the assumption seems to be that all
books are created equal. Nothing could be further from the truth. In
the mass migration from print to digital, we’re seeing a profusion of
digital books — many of them out of copyright — that look new and even
“HD,” but which may well have been supplanted by more accurate
editions and better translations. We need a digital readers’ guide — a
place readers can find out whether the book they’re about to download
is the best available edition.

And finally, two related problems. I already have a personal library.
But most of the books I’ve ever read have come from lending libraries.
Barnes & Noble has released an e-reader that allows short-term
borrowing of some books. The entire impulse behind Amazon’s Kindle and
Apple’s iBooks assumes that you cannot read a book unless you own it
first — and only you can read it unless you want to pass on your
device.

That goes against the social value of reading, the collective
knowledge and collaborative discourse that comes from access to shared
libraries. That is not a good thing for readers, authors, publishers
or our culture.

VERLYN KLINKENBORG

It is astonishing how old the morning's headlines seem by evening.

It is astonishing how old the morning's headlines seem by evening.

Praying for a Pokkuri Moment: No Muss, No Fuss

by Danny Dan Daniel Bloom

When it's time to meet your Maker, do you want to hang in there as
long as possible, even if you are bed-ridden and in pain and in an
assisted-living residence, or do you just want to ''pop off''? In
Japan, there's a temple in devoted to ''popping off,'' which in
Japanese is called ''pokkuri''.

I recently ran this concept by the celebrated and cerebral film critic
Roger Ebert -- who knows a thing or two about death and dying, and
living and life! -- and after reading my note he tweeted on Twitter:
"...'Pokkuri' -- the Japanese word for popping off suddenly. There's
even a Pokkuri goddess."

I had casually mentioned in a comment on Mr Ebert's blog that he might
want to know about the Japanese concept of pokkuri, which literally
means to ''pop off'' in one's sleep or in sudden heart attack in bed
or outside while walking around the neighborhood, a painless, quiet
and serene death. He liked the term, apparently, noting on his blog:
"I googled the term and found your own blog on Open Salon:
http://j.mp/apcFFR. Yeah, no muss, no fuss."

It's true, in Japan, every year, thousands of elderly people visit
Kichidenji Temple in Nara Prefecture where they pray for a pokkuri
death — preferably during sleep or a sudden heart attack — so they are
not a burden on their families during their final days. I lived in
Japan for five years in the 1990s, and while I never made it to this
celebrated temple, I read a news report
about it five years ago.

The Kichidenji Temple was established in 987 by a monk whose mother
had passed away peacefully wearing clothes that he had prayed over. As
time passed, a new Japanese tradition took shape, and now elderly
people visit Kichidenji to pray for a discreet and quick passing.
Although most of the visitors and supplicants are Japanese, foreigners
often visit the temple as well, mostly out of curiosity, and the
blogosphere is lit up here and there with photographs of the temple
and maps on how to get there.

The word caught my attention: ''pokkuri'', to pop off. Maybe pokkuri
is a good concept to borrow from the Japanese, I thought, as I posted
my first blog comment about the concept a few years ago, intoning this
brief prayer: "God, grant me a good life, a useful (and meaningful)
life, and when it's time, let me 'pokkuri' in a dignified, discreet
way. Amen."

Kichidenji Temple, I've since learned, is located in Ikaruga-cho, not
Nara City, although it is in Nara Prefecture in between Osaka and
Tokyo. A friend of mine used to live a couple of minutes away from it.
He told me that a lot of the visitors first visit the more famous
Horyuji Temple (about ten minutes away) and then make their way to
Kichidenji.

Here's a link: www.town.ikaruga.nara.jp/ikaho/e/guide/guide.html


According to the temple's chief priest, pilgrims making their way to
the temple will chant a holy phrase and beat a wooden block, which
makes popping sounds (thus the term ''to pop off''). I am not making
any of this up. Roger Ebert knows exactly what I am talking about: "No
muss, no fuss."

After his tweet, some of Ebert's followers chimed in with their
reactions to this Japanese loan word.

"Those crazy Japanese! What will they think of next?" one person told Mr Ebert.

A wit, and there is always a wit on the Internet, commented: "I
thought 'pokkuri' was about premature ejaculation, for a moment
there."

"I thought you were getting vulgar," said another person. "The boomers
will get to know it & pray 4 it w the future of health care."

And a philosopher of death countered with this reaction: "When pokkuri
happens in the middle of the night, a spouse or family is/are often
bereft of the chance to say goodbye."

So we're left with this: in Japan there is a temple devoted to popping
off, and the received word in Japanese is "pokkuri." In America, there
are no temples for popping off, and there is
no word for the concept in our common vocabulary.

But is it time now to borrow this word from Japan and make it our own?
Roger Ebert believes it could work here. I, do, too.

God, grant me a good life, a useful (and meaningful) life, and when
it's time, let me 'pokkuri' in a dignified, discreet way.

By the way, as a footnote, while the concept of praying for pokkuri comes out of Japan, I'm told that in Roman Catholic tradition, one can also pray for a happy death in another ancient and inherited tradition. According to legend, St. Joseph died in the arms of what Catholics refer to as the Blessed Mother and Jesus.

"What a way to go!" Alexandria Karako, of  San Antonio, Texas,  told me. "It is not uncommon among my co-religionists to think about death in those terms."




----------------

Dan Bloom is a freelance writer. His days are numbered. Are yours?

Saturday, May 29, 2010

It's official: Dan Bloom has changed his name, legally, to Polar Cities Bloom -- and will be known by that name from now on and for the rest of his life (and his days are numbered, yes)

Polar Cities Bloom is now my legal name on driver's license, passport, library card, social security card and all other documents. Friends still call me Dan Danny or Daniel, of course, but legally I am now Polar Cities Bloom. Ask me why.

References: http://pcillu101.blogspot.com/

With the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and the coal fuckups, it's time to stop all use of coal and oil worldwide. Or else. Don't believe me? Come back in 500 years. I plan to.

Roger Ebert the celebrated and cerebral film critic in Chicago tweets on POKKURI: the Japanese term for "popping off" in one's sleep and dying a peaceful, quiet, painless death. RE: ebertchicago: Danny Bloom on "Pokkuri," the Japanese word for popping off suddenly. There's even a Pokkuri goddess in Japan!.

Roger Ebert tweets on POKKURI: the Japanese term for "popping off" in one's sleep and dying a peaceful quiet painless death.

RE: ebertchicago: Danny Bloom on "Pokkuri," the Japanese word for popping off suddenly. There's even a Pokkuri goddess. http://j.mp/apcFFR



http://open.salon.com/blog/danbloom/2009/08/07/pokkuri_a_japanese_way_of_death_by_popping_off


This tweet received 15,188 twitter mentions (110 replies and 88 retweets) from 15,188 distinct twitter users. In addition to ebertchicago followers, it has been read by 341,410 second-level followers (retweeters followers).


TMTheFreak 25 May 27, 2010 Reply
@ebertchicago Thanks "pokkuri" link. Interesting read.
9 minutes ago · Danny Bloom

 litdreamer 21 3 days ago Reply
@ebertchicago Those crazy Japanese! What will they think of next?

8 minutes ago · Danny Bloom saffronroses 123 3 days ago Reply
@ebertchicago When pokkuri happens in the middle of the night, a spouse or family is/are often bereft of the chance to say goodbye.

8 minutes ago · Danny Bloom ClaudeSeymour 29 3 days ago Reply
@ebertchicago Jeez, I thought "Pokkuri" was about premature ejaculation, for a moment there.

Lisa1LinenLady 1,674 2
@ebertchicago I thought you were getting vulgar. The boomers will get to know it & pray 4 it w the future of health care

NOTE: I had casually mentioned to Mr Ebert in a blog post that he might want to know about this Japanese term POKKURI, which literally means to POP OFF, in one's sleep or in sudden heart attack, a painless, quiet and serene death..........and Roger liked the term, replied to me, and tweeted it, and these comments came in, among others. Would love to see a larger national discussion on these issues, perhaps with a news story in the New York Times, or a wire story. Any reporterse interested in interviewing Mr Ebert or me or the monks in Japan who run the Pokkuri shrine in Nara, Japan? The AP had a story on the shrine a few years ago, that's how I first heard of it. Lived in Japan for five years 1990s but never heard the term until I saw the AP story. It resonates with me, so I am doing a quiet PR job for POKKURI, in anyone cares.

My pal Dan Bloom on “Pokkuri,” the - Twitter conversation


My pal Dan Bloom on “Pokkuri,” the Japanese word for popping off suddenly. There's even a Pokkuri goddess. open.salon.com - Ebertchicago (Roger Ebert) ...

twitoaster.com/.../my-pal-dan-bloom-on-pokkuri-the-japanese...

ebertchicago: My pal Dan Bloom on "Pokkuri," the Japanese word for ...

ebertchicago: My pal Dan Bloom on "Pokkuri," the Japanese word for popping off suddenly. There's even a Pokkuri goddess. http://j.mp/apcFFR ...

www.tweetsoup.com/item/206064

Thursday, May 27, 2010

June 17 issue TIME magazine, LETTERS TO EDITOR: re Leslie Buck and Anthora cup obituary

June 17 issue TIME ASIA




LETTERS



Tempest in a coffee cup


Re: "Leslie Buck" (May 17): There is no documented proof that the late


Leslie Buck actually designed the Anthora (sic) coffee cup. In


addition, while TIME says the name came from the way Buck


mis-pronounced the word Anthora, a type of Greek vase called


"Amthora," other accounts say the word was a typo in a 1963 magazine


article about Greek vases that the paper cup firm copied without


fact-checking. Maybe TIME should have done some fact-checking, too.


Dan Bloom


Chiayi City, Taiwan





An Oily Matter

Re "The Meaning of the Mess" [May 17]: Offshore drilling has been conducted for decades with relatively few problems. Unfortunately, all it takes is one calamity to bring out the alarmists who call for a ban on the activity in the calamity's aftermath. The BP oil spill is the exception, not the rule.

Stephen V. Gilmore,

Charlotte, N.C., U.S.



How much more evidence do we need to understand that the "Drill, baby, drill" philosophy is irresponsible and places our economic stability and environmental future in jeopardy? I hope this tragedy moves us to demand increased financial support for and political action toward renewable-energy development and implementation. It's time to stop making excuses and start insisting that Big Oil be held accountable for its negligent actions and profit-driven policies. Clearly, we can begin by showing the politicians who indulge oil executives the door with the exit sign.

Brad Hruska,

Shaker Heights, Ohio, U.S.



Deconstructing the Broadway Bomber

I am concerned with the Grand Theft Auto – esque depiction of Faisal Shahzad in the May 17 issue. In a world where people crash a state dinner to promote a reality show, we might be encouraging would-be terrorists with the promise of romanticized press coverage.

George Davis,

Williston, Vt., U.S.



We have always been a nation that is willing to help other countries, but what do we get in return? A stab in the back. I think it's time we make getting into our country and becoming an American citizen much harder. I am furious that someone like Shahzad came into our country freely, got an education, then tried to hurt as many of us as possible. We as Americans need to put a stop to this injustice.

Lynne Gaylor,

Clearfield, Pa., U.S.



Shahzad's attempted bombing proves that Americans should be more concerned about the legal immigrants who want to harm us rather than the illegal immigrants who only want a job.

Kenneth Lee,

Raytown, Mo., U.S.



Although the events in Times Square were certainly frightening, the political backlash against Pakistanis and Muslims was even more so. As a Pakistani American, I implore my fellow citizens to practice tolerance toward this culturally rich, peaceful community whose members have overwhelmingly turned their backs on the terrorism and violence that have plagued their native region. Don't make us pay for the mistakes of others.

Zoya Mehmoud,

Alexandria, Va., U.S.



TIME's article on the Times Square incident is rather biased. There was a great deal mentioned about the tragic loss of life that could have occurred if the explosion had taken place on May 1, but little about the many deaths suffered by civilians at the hands of drone missile attacks in Pakistan. Is a Pakistani life not worth the same as that of a U.S. citizen? You should be bridging the gap between Muslims and the West instead of heightening tensions.

Syed Naheer Ameer,

Karachi



Bring On the Bieber!

Re "Pop Star 2.0" [May 17]: Since I am an aspiring musician, Justin Bieber's story is an inspiration. With all the artists out there who rely on connections or reality shows to gain success, it is refreshing to see a young person make it big by his own means. His natural musical talent makes marketing his preteen charm easy.

Alva Ramirez,

Los Angeles







Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1992245,00.html#ixzz0pBkkFUTH

Sunday, May 23, 2010

So? So! So.....

ANAND GIRIDHARADAS tells us:



So, this is about the word “so.”

If you speak English for work or pleasure, there is a fair chance that you’ve done it, too.

“So” may be the new “well,” new “um,” new “oh” and new “like.” No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped to the beginning, where it can portend many things: transition, certitude, logic, attentiveness, a major insight.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, late last year: “So, it’s not only because we believe that universal values support human rights being recognized and respected, but we think that it’s in the best interest for economic growth and political stability. So we believe that.”

A dispatch on National Public Radio last month, in which a quarter of sentences began with “so”: “So it’s, I think, the fifth largest in the nation. So, but now that’s the population in general. So there are sort of two, there are two things that are circumstantial.”

A quotation in a report last month from Channel NewsAsia, based in Singapore: “So, what we’re doing is — elephants have had these migratory routes, basically like islands connecting parks between each other; they’ve got nowhere to move and people have encroached on them.

“So, we negotiate with the people to move from the land. So, what we do, we buy the land, build them houses off the corridors and give them exactly the same amount of arable land back.”

A recent news briefing by Vitaly Churkin, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, in which 5 of 21 sentences began with “so”: “So, all those issues, we hope, will be addressed in the report of the secretary general.”

For most of its life, “so” has principally been a conjunction, an intensifier and an adverb.

What is new is its status as the favored introduction to thoughts, its encroachment on the territory of “well,” “oh,” “um” and their ilk.

So, it is widely believed that the recent ascendancy of “so” began in Silicon Valley. The journalist Michael Lewis picked it up when researching his 1999 book “The New New Thing”: “When a computer programmer answers a question,” he wrote, “he often begins with the word ‘so.”’ Microsoft employees have long argued that the “so” boom began with them.

In the software world, it was a tic that made sense. In immigrant-filled technology firms, it democratized talk by replacing a world of possible transitions with a catchall.

And “so” suggested a kind of thinking that appealed to problem-solving types: conversation as a logical, unidirectional process, proceeding much in the way of software code — if this, then that.

This logical tinge to “so” has followed it out of software. Starting a sentence with “so” uses the whiff of logic to relay authority. Where “well” vacillates, “so” declaims.

To answer a question starting with “well” suggests you are still considering it, don’t know fully but are getting there. To answer with “so” better suits the age, perhaps: A Google-glued generation can look it up where their parents would have said “I don’t know,” Facebook and Twitter encourage ordinary people and not just politicians to stay on message, and we gravitate toward declamatory blogs and away from down-the-middle reporting.

“So” also echoes the influence of a science- and data-driven culture. It would have been unimaginable a few decades ago that literature scholars would use neurological correlation analysis to evaluate texts, or that ordinary people would quantify daily activities like eating, sex and sleeping, or that software would calculate what songs we will like.

But in algorithmic times, “so” conveys an algorithmic certitude. It suggests that there is a right answer, which the evidence dictates and which should not be contradicted. Among its synonyms, indeed, are “consequently,” “thus” and “therefore.”

And yet Galina Bolden, a linguistics scholar who has written academic papers on the use of “so,” believes that “so” is also about a culture of empathy gaining steam in a globalized world.

To begin a sentence with “oh,” she said in an e-mail, is to focus on what you have just remembered and your own concerns. To begin with “so,” she said, drawing on her study of a database of recorded ordinary conversations, is to signal that one’s coming words are chosen for relevance to the listener.

The ascendancy of “so,” Dr. Bolden said, “suggests that we are concerned with displaying interest for others and downplaying our interest in our own affairs,” she said.

“So” seems also to reflect our fraught relationship with time. “Well” and “um” are open-ended; “so” is impatient. It leans forward, seeks a consequence, sums things up. It is a word befitting a culture in which things worth doing must bear fruit now, where it is more fulfilling to day-trade grain futures than to raise grain.

Today we live in fragments. You may be reading this column while toggling among your cellphone, iPad and laptop while eating lunch and proofreading a report. In such a world, “so” may serve to defragment, with its promise that what is coming next follows what just came, said Michael Erard, the author of “Um...: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean.”

The rise of “so,” he said in an e-mail, is “another symptom that our communication and conversational lives are chopped up and discontinuous in actual fact, but that we try in several ways to sew them together — or ‘so’ them together, as it were — in order to create a continuous experience.”

Perhaps we all live now in fear that a conversation could snap at any moment, interrupted by so many rival offerings. With “so,” we beg to be heard. This, we insist, is what you’ve been waiting to hear; this is the “so” moment.



E-MAIL pagetwo@iht.com

What's the future of the news business in a world of multiple media inputs?

Roberto De Vido .....based in Japan..... speaks of the future of the news business:

When things go wrong at the New York Times with its sometimes shoddy or unvetted reporting or PR-press release-influenced reportage, though this sort of thing may be common throughout the industry, we hold the Times to a higher standard, in part because of the high standards it has established for itself over the decades, and in part because the Times itself swaggers through the media landscape hinting (and sometimes saying outright) it is unanswerable to anyone but itself. [And even then, the Public Editor doesn't seem to get much respect.]

With the news that the Times will erect a paywall in January, however, I got to wondering how much of the Times is essential (though I have no problem paying for news, and do). We now live in a world of multiple media inputs, and for most people "news" is no longer a package, printed on paper and delivered early in the morning, but discrete stories, collected from a wide range of sources, including in my case The Economist, the Guardian, the NY Times, the LA Times, Slate, and more. I subscribe to a superb (and free) e-newsletter called The Browser, which sources stories (I think) via reader recommendations (which are then curated, I think) and has broadened my list of media inputs enormously.

Except for print subscribers, how many people read the NY Times cover to cover anymore? And specifically, what media outlets are "the best" for business news, global politics, sports, domestic news and politics, arts, etc.? If you're a media owner, and you're not "best in class" (and you don't have a political slant, e.g. Fox News, that puts you in the always-more-lucrative-than-the-news entertainment business), in any one category, what's your future?


http://politicomix.blogspot.com/
Facebook Profile:
http://www.facebook.com/roberto.devido


 Roberto De Vido


Yokosuka, Japan
Japan-based corporate communications strategist • 20 years in Asia (resident in China/Japan, working regionally) • satirist • cartoonist • comics writer

Roberto De Vido is a communications consultant based in Japan. He has over 15 years of experience working with multinational clients in China and Japan. Prior to moving to Japan, he lived in Hong Kong, where he founded a public relations company and a custom publishing firm, and launched an independent advertising-supported magazine.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Flying is a modern-day lottery: The 158 people who were killed in the Air India Express plane crash in Mangalore lost the lottery! Sigh!

Flying is safe, very safe, according to industry statistics. But don't
ask the people who died on the ill-fated Air India Express jet that crashed about
statistics. They are dead now. As in Rest in Peace dead. Dead. Gone.

Landing in rainstorm and low visibility! Stupid pilot! Gambling with the lives of his crew and passenger manifest. Gone with the wind now.

You also might remember the news of the ill-fated flight of a Swissair jet
flying from New York to Geneva back in the 1990s, and also the news
reports about LAPA Flight 3142 that failed to take flight in
Argentina. Yet, even with this new crash, airline reservations will
remain strong, the flying public hardly blinks and the sky's the limit.
Nothing changes much in the world of aviation and flying safety.

It's
a gamble, every flight is a gamble but statistically, you stand to
win. The numbers are on the side of the living.

But there's a funny thing about the way plane crashes are reported in
the news media -- and the way the news is received and digested.

After any major crash, after the bold headlines and day-after
analyses, reality returns to the normality that is life.

People who are neurotically afraid to fly (let's call them "fearful
flyers") feel justified in thinking the way they do. They often clip
out front-page newspaper stories and put them in a mental scrapbook.
"See," they tell everyone who listens, " flying is not safe, never
was, never will be. How much more evidence do you need?"

Psychiatrists report this all the time. After every major crash that
makes international headlines, the fearful flyers among us (and there
are many; 30 million in the US, maybe three million in Taiwan) say: "I
told you so."

And they add, just so we won't forget: "I am not neurotic. You think
flying is safe? Go ahead and fly, sucker!"

People who are not afraid to fly have another survival mechanism, call
it a defense mechanism. They see the news on TV and read the stories
in the press and say: "Too bad, a real tragedy. But it was just fate,
an ill-fated flight. The planes I fly on will never crash. I am
indestructible, I am a realist."

And they will fly, again and again. Because flying is safe and
statistically you've got a better chance of arriving on time and in
perfect condition (minus the jet lag, of course, or the boozy
hangover) than the poor blokes in urban traffic jams below. Every Web
site devoted to fear of flying will tell you so. And statistics don't
lie.

There's a third group who find plane crashes reassuring. These are the
people who put their faith in God or Buddha or Allah.

"See, " they say to anyone who will listen, "God works in mysterious
ways. When your time comes, your time comes. God is just calling you
back early. The pearly gates await you. You have nothing to fear but
fear itself. Trust in the Lord and the Kingdom of Heaven shall be
thine."

It works, too. Every group finds something in plane crashes, food for
thought, fuel for fiery arguments. And they are all right.

And then there are the plane spotters, those devilish plane buffs who
stand near runway approaches at major airports around the world and
take comfort in watching the slow, graceful approaches of jetliners
and prop planes as they jockey for landing rights and runway reunions.
There are lots of them out there, every day, everywhere. Fascinated by
all kinds of aircraft, they come armed with cameras and a sense of
mission. Plane crashes don't stop them, grizzly TV images don't stop
them, even typhoons don't stop them.

The final word on plane crashes? There is no final word. The world
returns to normal, very quickly, and everyone retreats to their
private vision of heaven and hell. The bell rings. Classes resume in
the School of Hard Landings and nobody's the wiser.

Except insurance companies. They learn the most from these things.

In India, there will be a thorough investigation, a report, assigning
of blame. Funerals for the dead, psychiatric counselling for the
families.

But nothing will change. Pilots will still attempt to land their
magnificent flying machines in stormy weather, corporations will still
put emphasis on the bottom line, passengers will still put their trust
in some magical non-existant God, amazing technology that enables them to be god-like for a few
hours in the air, and fate.

Flying is safe, very safe, according to industry statistics. But don't
ask the 8 survivors of the recent Air India Express about statistics. They almost lost the
lottery.

After every accident, there is hand-wringing, assigning of blame,
officials who humbly take responsibility and resign. Newspapers
dutifully print obituaries, TV news segments will show us the grieving
families, over and over again.

It doesn't matter if it's TWA Flight 800 over Long Island or the
Lockerbie explosion over Scotland or even the KAL 007 shootdown over
the Sea of Japan or Air India Express from Dubai to Mangalore.

Planes fly, planes explode, planes crash. Every flight is a race
against time, against lift and stall, against the elements. Is flying
safe? Sure.

One wonders if anything has been learned. Flying is still a lottery in
which most of us come out as winners. But for many modern travelers,
the flying is over; they lost the lottery and died unspeakable deaths over the past 50 years. Who's counting?

God?

typestalgia -- [14,5657 thumbs up]

typestalgia

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=typestolgia


(noun) - A nostalgia for old manual and electric typewriters as well as the sound of typewriting on such machines

"I like my computer with its sleek keyboard, of course, but I must say, I also harbor a personal typestalgia for the old days of manual typewriters and electric typewriters."

-- overheard at a watercooler in Manhattan, May 15, 2010

Typestalgia: nostalgia for old typewriters and typewriting -- accepted now as a new word by UrbanDictionary.com

See UD.

This is the truth: reading on paper surfaces trumps reading off screens every time, in terms of retention, processing, analysis and critical thinking. So what?

Yeh, Bloom, so what?

What if reading on screens is not really reading per se, but a new kind of reading called screening, and future MRI scan studies prove this?

Then what? Will Patricia Cohen of the New York Times explore this?

What if reading online turns out not be "reading" per se, but a new kind of reading mode best called "screening" -- then what?

Then what?

What is reading online turns out not be "reading" per se, but a new kind of reading mode best called "screening" -- then what?

Dish.

Flying is a modern-day lottery: The 158 people who were killed in the Air India Express plane crash in Mangalore Lost the Lottery! Sigh!

Flying as a modern-day lottery: The 158 people who were killed and the eight who survived in the Air India Express plane crash in Mangalore Lost the Lottery! Sigh!

by forensic blogger Danny Bloom, with apologies to CNN reporter Richard Quest!


CYBERSPACE -- May 22, 2010

Flying is safe, very safe, according to industry statistics. But don't
ask the people who died on the ill-fated Air India Express jet that crashed about
statistics.


You might remember the news of the ill-fated flight of a Swissair jet
flying from New York to Geneva back in the 1990s, and also the news
reports about LAPA Flight 3142 that failed to take flight in
Argentina. Twelve years have passed since that Swissair flight, airline reservations are
still strong, the flying public hardly blinks and the sky's the limit.
Nothing changes much in the world of aviation and flying safety. It's
a gamble, every flight is a gamble but statistically, you stand to
win. The numbers are on the side of the living.

But there's a funny thing about the way plane crashes are reported in
the news media -- and the way the news is received and digested.

After any major crash, after the bold headlines and day-after
analyses, reality returns to the normality that is life.

People who are neurotically afraid to fly (let's call them "fearful
flyers") feel justified in thinking the way they do. They often clip
out front-page newspaper stories and put them in a mental scrapbook.
"See," they tell everyone who listens, " flying is not safe, never
was, never will be. How much more evidence do you need?"

Psychiatrists report this all the time. After every major crash that
makes international headlines, the fearful flyers among us (and there
are many; 30 million in the US, maybe three million in Taiwan) say: "I
told you so."

And they add, just so we won't forget: "I am not neurotic. You think
flying is safe? Go ahead and fly, sucker!"

People who are not afraid to fly have another survival mechanism, call
it a defense mechanism. They see the news on TV and read the stories
in the press and say: "Too bad, a real tragedy. But it was just fate,
an ill-fated flight. The planes I fly on will never crash. I am
indestructible, I am a realist."

And they will fly, again and again. Because flying is safe and
statistically you've got a better chance of arriving on time and in
perfect condition (minus the jet lag, of course, or the boozy
hangover) than the poor blokes in urban traffic jams below. Every Web
site devoted to fear of flying will tell you so. And statistics don't
lie.

There's a third group who find plane crashes reassuring. These are the
people who put their faith in God or Buddha or Allah.

"See, " they say to anyone who will listen, "God works in mysterious
ways. When your time comes, your time comes. God is just calling you
back early. The pearly gates await you. You have nothing to fear but
fear itself. Trust in the Lord and the Kingdom of Heaven shall be
thine."

It works, too. Every group finds something in plane crashes, food for
thought, fuel for fiery arguments. And they are all right.

And then there are the plane spotters, those devilish plane buffs who
stand near runway approaches at major airports around the world and
take comfort in watching the slow, graceful approaches of jetliners
and prop planes as they jockey for landing rights and runway reunions.
There are lots of them out there, every day, everywhere. Fascinated by
all kinds of aircraft, they come armed with cameras and a sense of
mission. Plane crashes don't stop them, grizzly TV images don't stop
them, even typhoons don't stop them.

The final word on plane crashes? There is no final word. The world
returns to normal, very quickly, and everyone retreats to their
private vision of heaven and hell. The bell rings. Classes resume in
the School of Hard Landings and nobody's the wiser.

Except insurance companies. They learn the most from these things.

In Paris, there will be a thorough investigation, a report, assigning
of blame. Funerals for the dead, psychiatric counselling for the
families.

But nothing will change. Pilots will still attempt to land their
magnificent flying machines in stormy weather, corporations will still
put emphasis on the bottom line, passengers will still put their trust
in God, amazing technology that enables them to be god-like for a few
hours in the air, and fate.

Flying is safe, very safe, according to industry statistics. But don't
ask the survivors of Flight 447 about statistics. They lost the
lottery.

After every accident, there is hand-wringing, assigning of blame,
officials who humbly take responsibility and resign. Newspapers
dutifully print obituaries, TV news segments will show us the grieving
families, over and over again.

It doesn't matter if it's TWA Flight 800 over Long Island or the
Lockerbie explosion over Scotland or even the KAL 007 shootdown over
the Sea of Japan or Air France Flight 447.

Planes fly, planes explode, planes crash. Every flight is a race
against time, against lift and stall, against the elements. Is flying
safe? Sure.

One wonders if anything has been learned. Flying is still a lottery in
which most of us come out as winners. But for some modern travelers,
the flying is over; they lost the lottery and died unspeakable deaths.

Friday, May 21, 2010

Typestolgia

typestolgia: i coined this neologism today in honor of Sky Ferrante!

Last typist refuses to switch to laptop, gets boot from Writers Room in Greenwich Village

Rich Sharpiro at the Daily News in NYC writes on May 20...
The ribbon has run out on the last typewriter at a Manhattan writers' den.


Skye Ferrante has spent six years at the Writers Room in Greenwich Village, blissfully banging away on his grandmother's 1929 Royal typewriter.



The 37-year-old writer represented a bygone era, the last typewriter-user in a special room devoted to typists.



"In the event that there are no desks available, laptop users must make room for typists," read a sign posted in the "Typing Room" for years.



When Ferrante returned to the Writers Room in April after an eight-month break, the sign was gone and his noisy typewriter was no longer welcome.



"I was told I was the unintended beneficiary of a policy to placate the elderly members who have all since died off," said Ferrante, a Manhattan native who's writing children's books. "They offered me a choice to switch to a laptop or refund my money, which to me is no choice at all."



Ferrante was peeved, but not completely surprised.



A growing number of scowls had replaced the smiles that once greeted the arrival of his black, glass-key typewriter.



"The minute the sign came down, I realized there was antagonism from some of the new members," he said. "They gave me an attitude when they saw me setting up the typewriter."



Ferrante's connection to typewriters runs deep. He owns at least five of the old-school machines, his devices of choice since his teens.



"There's a different commitment when you know you're making a mark on the page, when you strike a key and bleed ink on the page," he said.



After being contacted by the Daily News, Writers Room officials told Ferrante he can continue working on his typewriter until the end of his term on June 30.



Executive Director Donna Brodie said staffers didn't realize Ferrante was a typist when he rejoined. All the others had died or converted to laptops.



"It would mean that everybody else who wanted to work in that room would flee," Brodie said. "No one wants to work around the clacking of a typewriter. That's why the room had been established."



Writers pay $1,400 a year for access to the airy haven of private cubicles on Broadway near Astor Place.



Maria Laurino, a regular, was baffled by the sudden ban.



"Skye has been here for years, and there's never been an issue," said the Manhattan essayist. "I'm surprised as to why there'd be an issue now."

Ferrante said he's so bitter he doesn't plan on returning.

"Some people like to listen to vinyl. Some people prefer to drive a stick shift," he said. "I just wish that there were some typists out there that would back me up, but I don't know any."

But a commenter on the NYDN website added this biting comment IN CAPS, SHOUTING!
ellenlilly comments


5:53 PM

May 20, 2010

I NEED TO SAY THE FOLLOWING: I HAVE BEEN A MEMBER OF THE WRITER'S ROOM FOR YEARS. I LOVE THE WRITER'S ROOM. THEY ARE AN AMAZING ORGANIZATION AND THE STAFF IS SECOND TO NONE -- ACCOMMODATING, FRIENDLY, GENEROUS , AND TOLERANT. THE PROBLEM, FOR ME, IS NOT THAT SKYE USES A TYPEWRITER. WHAT MANY WRITERS WILL TELL YOU IS THAT THE REAL PROBLEM IS THAT HE IS A RUDE, THOUGHTLESS, HIGHLY AGGRESSIVE ****. I HATE TO SAY BAD THINGS ABOUT PEOPLE, BUT THAT'S THE GOD'S HONEST TRUTH. I HAVE WITNESSED HIS BAD BEHAVIOR PERSONALLY AND REPEATEDLY. I GET ALONG WITH EVERYBODY, AND MY MOTHER ALWAYS TOLD ME; "IF YOU DON'T HAVE A KIND WORD, KEEP SILENT". BUT THIS ARTICLE FORCES ME TO DISREGARD MY MOTHER'S ADVICE. SKYE IS AN OPPORTUNISTIC **** LOOKING FOR HIS 15 MINUTES OF FAME, AND SADLY, YOUR PAPER FELL FOR IT. PEOPLE "BREAK THE RULES" AT THE WRITER'S ROOM ALL THE TIME, AND BELIEVE ME -- THE STAFF AND FELLOW WRITERS ARE ALWAYS TOLERANT, AND ALWAYS SEEK TO "LIVE AND LET LIVE". BUT TRUST ME, IF IT WAS SOMEONE ELSE....

email to reportet at:
rschapiro@nydailynews.com

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Interview with Larry Hall from SurvivalCondo.com

AfterLife in a Kansas Missile Silo: Interview with Larry Hall from SurvivalCondo.com by PlanetShifter.com


Alana Semuels found me when she saw the episode of Jesse Ventura's TV show "Conspiracy Theory". We were featured in one episode and she saw it and called me for an interview after she saw my website (www.survivalcondo.com).
We have been on ABC Nightline and several other regional shows. We just concluded a multi-day shoot with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation who is doing a new documentary on 2012.

As for the Polar Cities, I do not disagree; I'm just more concerned about the short-term situation. I have a wife and 5-year old son. I will sleep better when my project is complete and we have a "safe harbor" if it is needed.

Fallout shelters for a new generation, science fiction by L.A. Times reporter Alana Semuels

Underground bunker berths and 'survival condos' purport to offer refuge from nuclear wars, terrorist attacks, giant tsunamis, 2012 — you name it. And they don't come cheap.

May 17, 3010
By Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times

It's tough to imagine the end of the world from Steve Kramer's peaceful hilltop home in San Pedro, with its views of lush palm trees and red-tile roofs above a turquoise sea.



The 55-year-old respiratory therapist does it anyway. Terror attacks, civil unrest, dirty bombs, earthquakes, 2012 — Kramer believes he must be ready to face them all. That's why he says he's reserved spots for himself and his family in an underground concrete shelter.

"I would hate to give all this up and live in a bunker," said Kramer, glancing at sailboats out on the Pacific Ocean with his feet roosted on a glass coffee table. "I'm not trying to perpetuate doom and gloom, but you have to be prepared."



Legions of Americans dug backyard fallout shelters to ride out atomic Armageddon during the Cold War. Now, with heightened concerns about terrorist attacks in the post-9/11 world, a new generation is looking underground.



"In some ways, our political climate is similar," said Jeffrey Knopf, associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "There's a lot of free-floating anxiety out there about the dangers that terrorists will get nuclear weapons … and it multiplies."



Cue the entrepreneurs. Come-ons for doomsday products, from survival classes to earthquake kits, abound on the Internet. Demand is fueled by natural disasters, terrorist activity and websites dedicated to exploring such topics as what will happen Dec. 21, 2012, the last day of the ancient Mayan calendar and the date that, some people believe, the world will end.



Larry Hall claims to be recruiting rich clients for what he calls an underground survival condo — in Kansas. He envisions a building that goes 15 floors beneath the ground, with units selling for $1.75 million. "After the earthquakes and volcanic explosions, they're calling up, saying everything they said was going to start happening is happening," said Hall, an engineer who lives in Florida. "It's making people nervous."



Michael Wagner claims to be peddling a personal "survival pod" for people to take refuge from tidal waves. The Oregon man says he's been getting a lot more nibbles since the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile.

Danny Bloom claims to have come up with an idea called Polar Cities, for survivors of global warming climate chaos in the distant future, say 2500 or so. Http://pcillu101.blogspot.com


In a down economy, spending money on a bunker berth may seem an extravagance. But Debby Leite of San Diego thinks it's prudent, and she's scraped together for a bunker for herself and her 6-year-old daughter.

"If you look at Noah's ark, everybody thought he was crazy, and then the floods came," she said. "At least this way I know I'll be taken care of."

Of course, fallout shelters were never a bargain. The typical cost of building a backyard bunker in the early 1960s, at $2,500, was half the annual income for most families at the time, says Kenneth Rose, author of "One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture."

Then, as now, the cost put post-apocalyptic digs out of reach for most Americans, which Rose deems a good thing.

Fallout-shelter culture "creates a society of fear, a society obsessed with its own survival," he said. "I don't think that's any way to live a life."

Indeed, many believe, to borrow from Jean-Paul Sartre, that ''hell is other people'' — especially when you're stuck with them underground in a concrete bunker with no escape. Some, including Steve Kramer's father, would rather sit on their porches with a cold drink and watch the end come.


Steve Kramer has other plans. He can foresee days of anarchy and desperation, when roving bands of have-nots assault the homes of the haves. His hilltop abode, with its stately columns, might be a target.

"We're not crazy people, but these are fearful times," Kramer said.

He's plotting out routes on a topographic map, stocking up on dried food and teaching his 12-year-old son to ride a dirt bike in case they have to travel off-road.

Kramer thinks others will start to feel the same way as 2012 approaches. And if he has the money to ensure that his family will be safe when something happens, Kramer said, why not use it?

"It's a matter of priority," he said. "My family wants to survive."

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Putting a Price on Words

Putting a Price on Words

Photograph by Reinhard Hunger. Set design by Sarah Illenberger.
The search terms displayed above were selected from a list of 8,000 collected by Experian Hitwise that drove traffic to news sites in the United States for the week ending April 24.

By ANDREW RICE
Published: May 10, 2010
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CloseLinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalink Last year, Sam Apple got the idea into his head that what the world needed was a new kind of newspaper. This was, to put it mildly, at odds with the consensus of the marketplace. At the time, several large media companies were in bankruptcy, others were trading at penny-stock levels and analysts were seriously asking whether some venerable publications — including this one — might soon cease to exist. The recession was only worsening a fundamental problem: the industry’s physical product, printed paper, was going the way of the rotary phone, and no one had yet figured out how to generate comparable revenues online. But Apple, a 34-year-old writer, wasn’t ready to give up on journalism as a profit-making enterprise. He began telling friends about his plans to start a Web publication called The Faster Times.

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Apple quit his part-time gig as director of interactive media for the Web site Nerve.com in New York and began recruiting. It wasn’t hard to find people eager to join. Employment in New York’s publishing sector shrank by a tenth last year, leaving behind a mass of glum, jobless writers. The good news, though, was that one of the very forces that was sapping industry profits — the Web’s demolition of barriers to entry — also made it quite simple and cheap for anyone to become a journalism entrepreneur. Using open-source software, which Apple hired programmers to customize, The Faster Times could get up and running for less than $20,000.

Before the site went live last summer, Apple and a group of editors held marathon meetings at a Brooklyn coffee shop with free wireless Internet. In one sense, The Faster Times was supposed to be a traditional publication, staffed by trained journalists covering a wide range of beats and guided by a coherent editorial mission. Where Apple’s model departed from convention, as a matter of necessity, was in the area of compensation. He couldn’t afford to offer salaries and benefits, or even flat freelance fees, so instead he promised contributors 75 percent of the revenues from all advertisements placed next to their articles. Payments would start small, but if The Faster Times prospered, as Apple hoped, so would its writers. He referred to the publication as a journalistic “collective,” but in truth it was a small experiment in capitalistic incentives: contributors would profit directly from their work, according to the market’s assessment of its value.

And therein lies the catch — for The Faster Times, for many similar start-ups and for the entire industry of media, old and new. No one seems to know how to value the product anymore. This isn’t a lament about declining standards of quality or the rude incursions of amateur bloggers. In fact, thanks to the Internet, people probably read more good journalism than ever. That’s precisely the problem: the sheer volume of words has overwhelmed a business model that was once based on scarcity and limited choice.

For many years, newspapers and magazines operated in fairly uniform fashion, supported by two streams of revenue. The consumers purchased the product, and businesses paid to reach them with advertisements. Recessions came and went, ad pages expanded and contracted, publications started and went under — but nothing disturbed the basic model. Online economics have changed both sides of the profit equation. “It’s dawning on people that the marketplace will no longer pay the freight,” says Ken Doctor, a former newspaper executive and the author of “Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.”

Early on, almost all print publications decided to offer free access to their online content, which over time cut into their print circulation. In theory, the industry should have been able to absorb the gradual loss of paying readers. Advertising always accounted for the vast majority of the publishers’ revenues — with newspapers, 80 percent was the rule of thumb — and because publications could reach vastly larger audiences online, it seemed reasonable to expect that they’d be able to make more money from ads. But instead, online ads sell at rates that are a fraction of those for print, for simple reasons of competition. “In a print world you had pretty much a limited amount of inventory — pages in a magazine,” says Domenic Venuto, managing director of the online marketing firm Razorfish. “In the online world, inventory has become infinite.”

“Maybe this is what success looks like,” says Nick Denton, speaking of his own business, Gawker Media — a popular and profitable network of Web sites covering technology, sports and celebrity news — as well as of disruptive ventures like Craigslist, the free site that has decimated classified advertising, once a lucrative source of income for newspapers. “You can have destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars, or billions of dollars, of revenue for other people,” Denton says, “but without capturing it all yourself.”

Yet for some — possibly foolhardy — reason, a lot of people still want to work in journalism, and even amid the depths of the recession, there have been stirrings of creativity. A multitude of younger, nimbler enterprises have popped up, unencumbered by the past and ready to try anything. History suggests that few of these ventures will ultimately survive: Web start-ups have a failure rate between 70 and 90 percent. But it’s quite possible that the experiments they’re staging are already producing the kind of innovations that make for new, sustainable business models.

The Faster Times went online last July, with a blast of publicity and a triumphant party in a Manhattan bookstore. The site had enlisted correspondents in 20 countries, and beats devoted to science, food, travel and the arts, in addition to goofier subjects, like time travel and jet packs. The whimsy aside, Sam Apple took his task seriously. “The crisis of American journalism,” he wrote in the mission statement, is “a financial crisis. Opinions posted on blogs are cheap. Great journalism is expensive.”

With any luck, he was about to discover it was also worth something.

You can’t call it a dot-com boom — there is not much capital, there are no parties with catered sushi and no one is expecting to get rich. But this generation of start-ups does share at least one trait with its 1990s predecessors: a conviction that they’re the vanguard of an unfolding revolution. One morning, as a March gale howled down Broadway, I visited the editors of the Web site True/Slant. Their loftlike office, in a vintage SoHo building, was bare, white and slightly chilly, as if designed to reflect the present ethic of austerity. With just five employees, True/Slant has built a significant audience since it started last year: about a million readers visit the site at least once a month, a number similar to the online following of The Village Voice or The Charlotte Observer. The site owes its modest but growing success to the work of more than 300 part-time contributors. It’s not so much a unified publication as a loosely connected commune of bloggers, who generate a continual stream of content with minimal editorial intervention. The company calls what it is doing “entrepreneurial journalism” and says it’s the future of the profession.

True/Slant is the creation of a lean, gray-bearded 57-year-old named Lewis Dvorkin. He began his career working at newspapers and magazines, and peppers his conversation with references to sainted editors of an earlier era. “I’m old enough to be a bit of a bridge from that world to whatever world we’re in today,” he told me. Dvorkin’s more recent and pertinent experience, however, came as a content-programming executive at AOL, where he played a role in creating the celebrity gossip site TMZ, which has since developed one of the largest audiences on the Web. A few years ago, he started toying with the idea that eventually led to True/Slant: could technology allow you to create a news organization without any of the familiar editorial hierarchies?

At True/Slant, Dvorkin told me, “you are the sole producer, creator, programmer of your content. That reduces — and this is key — the cost structure.” He started the site with a modest $3 million investment from Fuse Capital and Forbes Media, picking its name off a list of compound words that were made up by a Web developer. All of True/Slant’s writers are freelancers and are paid a pittance relative to the salaries offered at established media organizations. “Newsrooms today are high-cost, inefficient content-creation operations that will not be supported by advertising revenues in the digital world,” Dvorkin said. “It just won’t happen.”

Online, advertisers have immense power. Because it’s easy to track who is clicking what, they can aim with efficiency and typically pay according to the number of times their ads are actually viewed. Instead of sending word of its shoe sale to a million print newspaper subscribers, who may or may not be looking for shoes, a store can buy the page views of 50,000 people who are reading articles about fashion. Or the advertiser can place ads on heavily trafficked portal sites like Yahoo and AOL, both of which are currently expanding their production of original journalism. Or it can pay Google to insert its ads into search results. Or it can go to one of the large digital advertising networks that have arisen in recent years and buy unsold “remnant” page views at deep discounts. There is a lot less waste and a lot more choice, and the upshot is that advertising, which once produced robust margins for publishers, now sells for spare change online. Generally speaking, while some ad placements — like those on a site’s home page — go for a significant premium, pages of individual articles, if sold at the going rates, bring in between a penny and nickel each time a reader looks at one.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible to make money. If True/Slant can keep its production costs low and its traffic high, it can collect those pennies and nickels on a scale large enough to turn a profit. There are a couple of ways to do this as an online publisher. You can emphasize quality, producing a limited number of items in the hope that each will attract a great number of readers. Or a publisher can go for quantity, producing a lot of little things that add up in the aggregate. True/Slant’s low-cost newsroom churns out around 125 pieces of content a day.

Many companies practice this strategy at even higher volume. For instance, Examiner.com, owned by the billionaire Philip Anschutz, has a gigantic audience and a nationwide army of 36,000 localized contributors, or “examiners,” who produce articles on subjects like community news, lifestyle issues and pets, and are paid about 1 cent per page view. AOL is trying a similar “citizen journalism” approach on a site called Patch. Probably the most successful example is the Huffington Post, which employs 70 salaried editorial staff members and 6,000 uncompensated bloggers and recently pushed into the nation’s top 10 current-affairs Web sites, according to Nielsen Online, vaulting past sources like The Washington Post. The Huffington Post generates an average of 500 items a day, many of them aggregated content from other sources, and Examiner.com, more than 3,000.

Increasingly the online audience for these sites is coming in side doors, via links on blogs and social-networking Web sites like Facebook. Probably the most important tool for reaching large audiences, however, is Google. If you can climb to the top of the site’s search results, you’re certain to be rewarded with a huge number of clicks. Most publications these days try to harness the Google algorithm through an arcane process known as search-engine optimization. Some are more skilled at this than others. That’s why, as I write in mid-April, a search for the phrase “Eyjafjallajokull Volcano” brings up a Huffington Post photo slide show near the top of its results.

A handful of enterprising new sites, like Associated Content and Demand Media, are now turning the whole process around, generating content that is specifically designed to feed Google’s appetites. They don’t call what they do journalism or care about breaking news, but they say they’re generating huge advertising revenues, and their strategies are being closely watched. “We realized that there was this massive opportunity, that the economics of content and media distribution had shifted, and they had shifted permanently,” says Steven Kydd, who oversees original content production for Demand Media. The company claims to have raked in $200 million in revenue last year and is now reportedly talking to Goldman Sachs about underwriting an initial public offering.

Demand’s business model draws on the skills of thousands of freelance contributors, who pick the topics they address from an automated list of more than 200,000 written and video assignments culled from Internet search requests. The topics are mostly geared toward answering practical questions and are posted to low-profile Web sites like eHow, or to YouTube, with which Demand has a profit-sharing agreement. The company claims to have devised an algorithm that projects precisely how much advertising revenue each assignment will return. It says these mathematically generated ideas are 4.9 times as valuable as those devised by mere human brainstorming.

“Our editors absolutely love this, because they are able to sift through millions of potential titles, and they know that they are all good ideas,” Kydd says. And profitable ones — nothing is assigned unless the algorithm predicts it can cover the costs of production. Demand’s freelancers can make around $15 or $20 per item. “The funny part is, sometimes we’ll ask people who work, say, in newspapers or magazines, ‘How much did that article cost you?’ ” Kydd says. “They literally have no idea.”

That’s changing. Though journalists tend to shudder at Demand Media’s approach, mainstream publishers are starting to co-opt portions of its model. USA Today, for instance, has contracted Demand to supply the content for its Travel Tips Web page, while AOL recently started a Web site called Seed, edited by Saul Hansell, a former New York Times columnist, which generates story ideas from search data. More generally, there is a growing appreciation among those who practice journalism of the Internet’s capacity to tell them what readers want to know.

“For traditional journalists, this is a difficult concept for them to grasp, and one reason it’s difficult is because it’s scary — it’s scary to actually have that data in front of you,” Dvorkin said. “It’s scary to say, wow, this is the audience, and now all of a sudden I have to respond to the audience because this is what they’re interested in.”

Dvorkin and Coates Bateman, a former book editor who runs True/Slant’s daily content operations, showed me around the site’s “dashboard,” the back office of its virtual newsroom. There was a dial, like a digital speedometer, which showed the volume of page views on the site and a list of trending topics on Google and Twitter, topped by the confection of the moment, the teenage-pop sensation Justin Bieber. (Sure enough, within an hour or so, a Bieber-related True/Slant post appeared.) There was a list that ranked the most-viewed items and metrics that tracked how they got their traffic — maybe via a link from a popular blogger, or the recommendation tool Digg. Most eerily, there was a little algorithm-driven display that showed contributors what other people were saying about their work out in the blogosphere — eavesdropping, in real time.

True/Slant structures its compensation to give writers an incentive to hustle for readers’ attention. Contributors are paid a monthly retainer and scaled bonuses based on how many people read their articles. The money isn’t enough to live off — the entrepreneurial journalist has many gigs — but True/Slant is reasonably generous in comparison with, say, the Huffington Post, which pays its nonstaff bloggers nothing but esteem. Most writers make a few hundred dollars a month if they hit their traffic targets, and a few big names, like the professional controversialist Matt Taibbi, make quite a bit more. In fact, if you break it down, True/Slant pays its writers more than the amount of revenue their work generates at the current online advertising rates. Stripped down as it is, the start-up isn’t yet turning a profit, and it’s now in the process of raising a second round of venture capital.

I asked Bateman, as a matter of raw economics, how much an individual article is worth to True/Slant’s bottom line, on average. He told me he calculated it out: around $10.

Sam Apple and I were sitting in a hushed and crowded cafe, amid the soft glow of open laptops. “I thought at the beginning that if I could create a top-notch journalistic outlet, and if I could do that at a small fraction of the cost, maybe advertising could cover it,” he told me. The Faster Times was now eight months old, and Apple was wiser about online economics. The summer before, the site charged out of the gate with a 24-hour posting schedule, a large and enthusiastic staff and guest posts from famous writers like Gary Shteyngart. By the fall, it had acquired a monthly audience of around 200,000 readers, according to the tracking site Quantcast — small compared with the Huffington Post’s but a pretty impressive return on $20,000, in Apple’s opinion. But the revenues that were coming in from Google AdSense, the ad-placement service he was originally using, were so paltry that Apple wondered, when he gave writers their 75 percent share, whether he was actually driving them away.

“I have a friend who is a behavioral economist,” he said. “He says that if you pay people tiny amounts, it’s worse than not paying them at all.” The Faster Times’s first round of payments ranged from $5 to $75. Revenues have increased substantially since Apple switched to another ad service, but the writers’ shares still don’t amount to much. Whether it was because of that, or fickleness, or the attractions of better-paying opportunities, many of the original Faster Times contributors gradually drifted off. Apple was now trying to hatch ideas for alternate sources of revenue, to ease the site’s dependence on advertising. “I still feel like there’s a lot to try,” Apple told me. “We can kind of be a testing ground for the latest experiments.”

Many other publications, confronted with the painful math, have reached the same conclusion: the business needs alternate schemes of support. Some have adapted tried-and-true formulas. The Daily Beast is backed by a generous billionaire, Barry Diller; others are mimicking NPR’s nonprofit model; Politico makes the majority of its revenue from, of all things, advertising in an offshoot print newspaper. Most familiar of all, there’s the subscription route, which the online editions of The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times have followed with success. The New York Times has announced that early next year it will institute a fee for frequent users of its site. Many analysts are doubtful that the subscription approach will work for everyone — surveys suggest that few consumers are willing to pay for news online. But some start-ups are experimenting with a variation on the idea, premium memberships, which give readers who sign up special access and perks. GlobalPost, an online publication for international news, is currently implementing such a program, offering subscribers the chance to participate in conference-call briefings by freelance correspondents stationed in more than 50 countries, and to vote on articles they’d like to see assigned.

One thing many of these new strategies have in common is a willingness to transgress time-honored barriers — for instance, by blurring the division between reporting and advertising. True/Slant offers to let advertisers use the same blogging tools that contributors do, to produce content that, while labeled, is blended into the rest of the site. Such marketing deals are central to the company’s plans for future revenue growth. “Everywhere I go the whole notion of enabling marketers to create content on a news platform is well received,” Lewis Dvorkin says. “It’s the way the world is moving.”

Not long ago, such an idea would have been considered heretical, and in many newsrooms, it still is. But clearly, attitudes are shifting. “Hopefully we’re breaking down the silliness of how church and state was historically implemented,” says Merrill Brown, a veteran media executive and investor who is currently building a network of local news sites. Once, most journalists took a posture of willful ignorance when it came to the economics of the industry: they never wanted to sully themselves by knowing the business. The recession has, through fear and necessity, made capitalists out of everyone.

The new journalistic entrepreneurs fall into two distinct categories. There are the proprietors, people like Charles M. Sennott, a foreign correspondent who took a Boston Globe buyout and became a founder and an executive editor of GlobalPost, or Alex Balk, Choire Sicha and David Cho, who were cut loose by Radar, a dying magazine, and decided to start the Awl, a smart and idiosyncratic commentary site. Then there are the small-scale entrepreneurs, the journalists who, having found themselves dislodged from a salaried way of living, are now scrambling to piece together a freelance income while building their personal brands. Since one group pays the other — or doesn’t, as the case may be — the two sides are engaged in a symbiotic dance around the issue of valuation. “I don’t think anybody has any idea of what anyone should be paid for a piece anymore,” Sicha says. “It’s more than $25, but less than a thousand . . . I think?” He added that, as of now, the Awl doesn’t pay much to anyone, including himself.

The question of how journalists should be paid is of intense interest to journalists, obviously, but it matters to readers too, in ways they may not realize. Structures of compensation affect the end product, especially when salaries or bonuses­ are tied to the pursuit of traffic, a model that many online start-ups follow. Established publications — some of which are instituting or contemplating similar schemes — are watching the experiment with curiosity and trepidation. Writers and editors know that click-driven Internet economics tend to reward lowbrow gimmickry. They have to decide whether to work around that or to embrace it as a fact of life.

One of the loudest proponents of the latter perspective is Henry Blodget, the editor in chief of Business Insider, a gossipy start-up. His talented staff breaks plenty of news and turns out the occasional high-prestige feature, but Blodget is unapologetic about mixing in a lot of eye candy and isn’t above illustrating articles about A.I.G.’s woes with unrelated photos of attractive women kissing. A former star stock analyst who was banned from the profession amid accusations of securities fraud — he paid $4 million to settle — he says he sees himself as a journalistic outsider, unencumbered by the weight of conventional wisdom. In March he wrote: “Perhaps it’s time to float a new theory: We’re already in the gutter. What we click on accurately reflects what we’re interested in, no matter how much we think and protest and hope to the contrary.” A few days afterward, Blodget engaged in an entertaining multiplatform spat over the issue with the Reuters columnist Felix Salmon, producing the calculation that, in order to earn back a $60,000 annual salary, an online journalist needs to generate a whopping 1.8 million page views a month.

Blodget takes a lot of flak for his iconoclasm, but the fact is, he’s only stating plainly what other editors think in private. If you don’t believe that, check out the list of the most popular posts on your favorite Web site sometime — sex, scandal and Sarah Palin always score high. Even publications that don’t go fishing for clicks discover that, inevitably, certain stories rise to the top. Charles Sennott told me that amid all of GlobalPost’s serious coverage of wars and earthquakes, two big hits during the site’s first year were a post titled, “Meet India’s First Porn Star,” and a slide show of Japanese cat outfits.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with giving readers what they secretly want every once in a while. The problem arises when you start producing articles solely for the id of the search engines, because some clicks are more valuable than others. This is the conclusion, at least, of Gawker Media’s Nick Denton, one of the first to pay writers according to their page views and now a high-profile skeptic of the practice. Denton built his company on the labor of freelance bloggers, but in the last year, he has moved to hiring them as full-time employees, with set salaries and bonuses­ tied to “unique visitors” — a metric that he says measures the writer’s ability to bring new readers into the fold. No sentimentalist, Denton says he changed the formula because he found that page-view incentives encouraged writers to deliver worthless rehashes rather than reporting and tabloid-style scoops — in other words, journalism.

“When we look at the numbers, it’s increasingly evident that the traditional blog post has become a complete commodity,” Denton says. When dueling algorithms compete to answer every human query, it turns out there’s value in telling people things they weren’t aware they didn’t know. To wit: Denton’s technology site Gizmodo recently bought a secret prototype iPhone that an Apple programmer lost in a bar and produced a post featuring pictures and the phone’s specs. Over two weeks, that item racked up nearly 10 million page views, an estimated 4.4 million of them from newcomers, bringing the site an enormous amount of attention (not the least of it from Apple’s lawyers and the police). Denton says his hope is that all the publicity attached to breaking big stories will translate into reader loyalty, brand equity and more lucrative advertising deals.

If that is the model of the future, then the new world could end up looking a lot like the old one, albeit with smaller newsrooms and new players. Politico replaces the Washington correspondent, TMZ is the gossip page and you can get coverage of your baseball team directly from MLB.com, which employs professional sportswriters. In cities like San Diego, New York and Washington, online start-ups are taking on metro news coverage, hoping to tap local ad markets. All of these publications have been hiring real, full-time employees — as have nontraditional providers like Yahoo, which is constructing a new political news site. Over the last few months, there has been a palpable uptick in both advertising and the journalism job market. The iPad, and its applications that restore magazines and newspapers to something like their traditional format, was greeted within the industry like the sight of a ship from a deserted island.

Still, it’s hard to foresee anything like a total restoration. Many publications are struggling to stay afloat, from storied titles like Newsweek, which was recently put up for sale, to scrappy start-ups like The Faster Times. One April evening, Sam Apple and nine top staff members of the publication gathered at the foreign editor’s place, a row house in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to talk over their prospects. Apple presented what he believed to be the best route forward: introducing a membership program.

Readers could sign up to sponsor a favorite writer, at rates ranging from $12 to $120 a year. The writers would get 70 percent of the proceeds and in return would come up with customized benefits for their sponsors. Over beer and tortilla chips, the editors got to brainstorming. One contributor, a professor and translator of Nietzsche, had already offered to answer a philosophical question of the reader’s choice. The dating columnist volunteered to critique online matchmaking profiles. Apple said that he’d just signed up a new writer. “She’s a Sarah Lawrence grad, but also a dominatrix,” he said. “She’s going to be starting soon, writing about sex and power. So there’s real incentive possibilities.”

“Not to get too theoretical,” the managing editor, Olivia Scheck, interjected over the laughter, “but this is the problem that we keep coming to with this idea, which is that we want to be selling journalism, not sex.”

Apple mentioned, with some cheerful chagrin, that the site’s most popular article ever in terms of page views was a blog post titled, “Megan Fox Has Wacky Hot Chick Syndrome.” That wasn’t exactly the kind of impact he had in mind when he came up with the idea for a new type of newspaper. But he said he liked to think that maybe a handful of those starlet-Googlers had stuck around to read the dispatches­ from Egypt and Turkey, or the acclaimed travel section, or the theater critic — who, contrary to all expectations, turned out to be The Faster Times’s highest initial advertising earner.

Since I’ve been regularly reading The Faster Times, I’ve been most affected by a column called Financial Stress. Written by Kathryn Higgins, a single mother in Connecticut who is losing her house in foreclosure, it’s a heartbreaking chronicle of unimaginable choices, like whether to squat or to move into a bedbug-infested homeless shelter. She just e-mailed Apple out of the blue one day, asking to contribute. There are a lot of voices­ like that in the Faster Times, writers who ended up on the wrong side of this recession. Whatever happens in the future, Apple has accomplished something by giving them a place to set their experiences down in words, creating a record of this transitional moment. That’s the essence of journalism, but its value remains in the eye of the beholder.



Andrew Rice is a contributing writer and the author of a book about Uganda, “The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget.”

Must-Read Of the Day: In the Digital Age, How Much Are Words Worth?

Must-Read Of the Day: In the Digital Age, How Much Are Words Worth?
Posted by Frank Ross May 18th 2010 at 6:11 am in Mainstream Media, New Media | Comments (17)
The New York Times Sunday magazine had a fascinating piece over the weekend by Andrew Rice about the new realities of publishing on the internet. It’s a long read, but worthwhile as a snapshot in time: the old media is dying and the new media is still struggling to be born:

For many years, newspapers and magazines operated in fairly uniform fashion, supported by two streams of revenue. The consumers purchased the product, and businesses paid to reach them with advertisements. Recessions came and went, ad pages expanded and contracted, publications started and went under — but nothing disturbed the basic model. Online economics have changed both sides of the profit equation. “It’s dawning on people that the marketplace will no longer pay the freight,” says Ken Doctor, a former newspaper executive and the author of “Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.”



Early on, almost all print publications decided to offer free access to their online content, which over time cut into their print circulation. In theory, the industry should have been able to absorb the gradual loss of paying readers. Advertising always accounted for the vast majority of the publishers’ revenues — with newspapers, 80 percent was the rule of thumb — and because publications could reach vastly larger audiences online, it seemed reasonable to expect that they’d be able to make more money from ads. But instead, online ads sell at rates that are a fraction of those for print, for simple reasons of competition. “In a print world you had pretty much a limited amount of inventory — pages in a magazine,” says Domenic Venuto, managing director of the online marketing firm Razorfish. “In the online world, inventory has become infinite.”


“Maybe this is what success looks like,” says Nick Denton, speaking of his own business, Gawker Media — a popular and profitable network of Web sites covering technology, sports and celebrity news — as well as of disruptive ventures like Craigslist, the free site that has decimated classified advertising, once a lucrative source of income for newspapers. “You can have destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars, or billions of dollars, of revenue for other people,” Denton says, “but without capturing it all yourself.”

Read the whole thing.

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Tags: Craigslist, New Media, New York Times

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+3 Vote up Vote down devilgold 44p · 1 day ago

There are no real journalists left, most are just "headline plagiarists" with nothing more than theoretical experience, and zero real substance and depth. Worthless.
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1 reply · active 1 day ago
+1 Vote up Vote down Couerl 69p · 1 day ago

In a sense this is true since the AP is the news and they're all libs on the board.. If the AP doesn't back it, it won't get any traction..
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+4 Vote up Vote down nolotrippen 96p · 1 day ago

I will miss all the "accredited journalists" who skip stories like Holder's not having read the Arizona law. Nothing to see here, readers. We'll just stick to the liberal, Democratic line.

It was plain when they refused to acknowledge the Tea Parties until months after they were already a major force -- and then treated them as a freak-show curiosity -- that the press had become fossilized in its bias.

I welcome the new press and its hard working, actual journalists.
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+2 Vote up Vote down jakee308 · 1 day ago

They still don't get it. Just because they offered some content from the print side on their websites doesn't mean they lost that much circulation to the websites.

The old media still doesn't get that folks were starving for any other source of news (actual news not opinion laced with news).
The sequence is
1. new news sources appeared and people began using it for a variety of reasons and not just because it was free.
2. old media saw that and decided they could get in on it because they already had the infrastructure to get the NEWS.
3. People still flocked more and more to the new sources of news. (some of this news was 'stolen' from old media.)
4. old media decides that since people aren't paying 'their fair share' for old media's news on the web and their losing their butts in print, they try to stem the flow by trying to limit or charge for access. This will just hasten the demise of old media in my opinion.

I don't buy access and won't unless they present it in a form that is useful to me. The best one I've seen is a site that you purchase 'copies' electronically of the newspaper you wish to read. It is cheaper and easier than buying the actual paper but still your forced to take it all or reject it all.

The old news media have made some bad assumptions.

They're about to compound the problem with a 'paywalls' structure but still using the old business model: you pay for the whole 'paper' to read our stuff and the ads we got paid to put up. If some of what we print is of no interest to you, you still have to pay for it. All or nothing.

Instead of rethinking the problem, they've just twisted the old business model to fit the new technology.

For the pay model to succeed it has to be fast and cheap. No monthly, quarterly, yearly subscriptions to pay for whatever the outlet chooses to put on their pages. Even if they print drivel, you still have paid for it in advance and can only cancel when the subscription is finished. (which is what happens now. It's been accelerated by the Depression but it still would have happened without it. BTW. It's the lack of advertising that is actually killing the old News media. Subscriber costs mostly only pay for distribution. The profit has always been in the classifieds and the print ads and with unemployment rampant and it's easier to advertise on the web, those ads have plummeted.)

A new pay model needs to be flexible, a buffet if you will, so that the user can pick and choose what they consider of value and they can refuse to pay for that which they either don't agree with or aren't interested in.

Old media thought processes are not going to work.

There also needs to be bundling of news and considerations of when and how we actually read and use the news. The old 3 or 4 editions a day might need to be revived along with a difference in focus depending on the time of day (which can indicate the type of user)

Plus it will take an agreement with all the other large outlet news website's in the world for the pay model to be effective. If just a few offer free access then the pay for access model is broke and so will the old media.
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+2 Vote up Vote down William_Z 69p · 1 day ago

Yes, it’s a long article and after reading it, I think Mickey Spillane summed it up best:

"I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends."

If the Old Media understood what Spillane understood, it won’t be going the way of the DoDo bird. Also, those digital outlets better not forget what Spillane lived by, wrote by and made money by, either.

Financial death is financial death whether its hardcopy or electronic, because electricity isn’t free either. Keep in mind, Big Brother FCC wants to wrap his totalitarian fingers around the Internet, so customers and currency are the only thing which will keep informational websites alive.
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+1 Vote up Vote down infinitefreedom · 1 day ago

In my mind, it's a moral dilemma, rather than a money issue. America is starting to wake up to the fact that it's being manipulated by leftist media. The fact is, they do not report the news, they tell us what they pick & choose, according to their liberal agenda. & we are getting screwed by this. & the democratic party that has been supported by this, is now trying to support yet more failure.

I say we have a Revolution of the People. Let the left fail, they are held up by lies anyway. Words are worth more today than they were in 2008, the height of liberalism in America. Today, we want more honesty. & that is a good thing.

Let the left die, just let it die. & then we can get our America, & our Liberty back.
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+1 Vote up Vote down Mr.Lincoln 86p · 1 day ago

It will be painful, but we will do exactly that. Let the left die, just let it die. & then we can get our America, & our Liberty back.

Restore the Republic,
God Bless America
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+1 Vote up Vote down Mr.Lincoln 86p · 1 day ago

Here is a YOU TUBE record of the President, that the President who want's to control the internet with net neutrality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCAffMSWSzY&fe...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP-IM7maxbI&fe...
Restore the Republic,
God Bless America
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+2 Vote up Vote down Lorben 105p · 1 day ago

I love being a capitalist and letting capitalism work....
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3 replies · active 1 day ago
+1 Vote up Vote down Mr.Lincoln 86p · 1 day ago

Ayn Rand pointed this out in her books.
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+2 Vote up Vote down Lorben 105p · 1 day ago

Whom I have been a student for years...in a Christian context though. I am currently reading "We the Living"...I just started it.
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+1 Vote up Vote down Mr.Lincoln 86p · 1 day ago

I know Ayn Rand was an atheist, but she had a great understanding on capitalism. What would happen if Atlas shrugged? It was not by choice, because she grew up in the Soviet Union were she did not have the opportunity, or freedom to learn,or to study religion.

Restore the Republic,
God Bless America
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0 Vote up Vote down Annie · 1 day ago

Amazing they cater only to the left when there's another 50% out here hungry for decent information. I guess it's why they're marxists...
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0 Vote up Vote down Annie · 1 day ago

It's why we come to blogs like the Bigs....thanks Frank and the rest of you truth-seekers. :)
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@TheRealGelfie AA is a rendering function and shouldn't affect the baking. When you go to render it then you can use AA. 2 days ago

View IntenseDebate profile +1 Vote up Vote down Couerl 69p · 1 day ago

The AP is the death panel of news and Journalism.
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0 Vote up Vote down Mt Top Patriot · 1 day ago

It is a downfall of their own making. I read the entire article, and the constant thread about the demise is its everyone Else's fault. Like Rude blogger journalism, and the oh so evil predatory practices of crag's List, nothing is as special as the main stream press, bla bla bla, boo hoo.

This reader is very happy and most grateful for the New Media. The one thing these chumps in the lamestream press fail to grasp is the singular paradigm unique to The New Media is that, like right here for instance, I get to put my 2 cents worth into the mix, and read what my fellow Americans got to say. THAT is profound and a sea change that is a huge plus for The New Media. Not to mention I'm not a taken for granted and abused reader any longer. The New Media is rude in comparison to the dinosaur press, and that is the beauty of it, one knows exactly what motives and bent, and why, about a particular New Media source. Something that is at the root of the demise of the lapdog press, which treats the news and my intelligence as their property that they can do with whatever suits an agenda doctrine and motive. The New Media is bare assed naked, it is why it works and is going to rule the journalism roost.