Tag: newspapers
Postscript
Mass layoffs are a fact of life in journalism. Your favorite writers and editors have dealt with them. But they weren’t supposed to happen at The Post.
Caught In The Middle
The mess with Bezos and The Washington Post is reflective of a trend that keeps popping up this year: The powerful entity stepping in it without considering the collateral damage.
Gatekept
Thoughts on a bruise to the ol’ ego that hurt a little more than I thought it would. But hey, it gives me a chance to talk about gatekeeping.
A Dylanesque Negotiating Strategy
One of the news industry’s biggest, longest-standing problems is that they do not value the work they create at the level it deserves. They should take a cue from the music industry’s biggest stars.
Old Archives, New Controversy
The New York Times has the most robust online archives of any newspaper, but it’s proving difficult to square their handling of a recent controversy with the quality of those archives.
USA Yesterday
Looking back at a sports-themed online service the now-40-year-old USA Today launched way back in 1989. Not all disks were left unscathed.
Longform Brevity
Alt-form storytelling, a key magazine-and-newspaper design trend, hasn’t truly flourished on the modern internet. Axios could go way further than it does.
Cut-Up Culture
Pondering how coupons became the lingua franca of the grocery store, and why they might be important to the survival of the newspaper.
Dead on Archival
Considering the challenges that face shuttered newspapers with decades or even centuries of material to preserve.
Pushing Photos Through Wires
The technology used to distribute photos through news wire services inspired a whole bunch of innovations with use cases beyond newspapers. Like television.
How I Research Stuff
If you’re a longtime reader of Tedium, you might wonder how I manage to uncover so many strange stories. Well, let me tell you. Hopefully it’s inspiring.
Strip-Mined News
Local newspapers have already faced issues with outsourcing and an array of cuts for years. But the threat is changing—and you should know what it looks like.
News In Small Bytes
Newspapers said they wanted to protect the print product, but they were raring to go when it came to experimental online news approaches in the early '80s.
Just The Fax, Ma’am
Newspapers once saw fax machines as an opportunity to distribute breaking news to the masses—then they saw it as a way to reach the niches. Neither worked out.
The Free Ride’s Over
For decades, ad-supported free daily newspapers defined commuting. But the Washington Post Express’ demise shows the model is headed towards the history books.
Wiki-Fail
Looking with fresh eyes at the Wikitorial, the Los Angeles Times’ extremely misguided attempt to bring the wiki concept to the newspaper editorial page.
Rethinking the Funny Page
With the loss of one newspaper comics-page giant and the departure of another, now’s a good time to reflect on whether the whole model needs to be reworked.
Trimmed For Space
As the newspaper industry contracted, so too did the furniture and the newsprint. Let's check out the first victims of the digital revolution.
CMYK All The Way
How mass-production printing technology, starting with the lithograph, was pushed forward thanks to a growing interest in color.
Honey, I Shrunk The Page
Microfiche (or microfilm, depending on how you roll) is a library mainstay, but its history is wild, according to this note I got from a carrier pigeon.
The Invention Of News
The field of public relations is still built on a single foundational tool—the press release. Why do we still use them? Well, for the companies, they work.
Disrupt the mainstream
"Mainstream culture," as a concept, needs to die. A little pre-history. The Diamond Sutra, a sacred Buddhist text and the world's oldest surviving printed book, was produced in China in 868 AD. It took another couple of hundred years before moveable type was invented, and another four hundred years for the printing press to be invented. Almost six hundred years after the first printed book was created, it became possible to mass produce literature. Two hundred years after that, the first newspa
For your consideration at SXSW Interactive
I’ve submitted a talk for South By Southwest 2011: Building the User-centered Web By establishing a general standard for social application interactions, the services and technologies used to make connections become less relevant; the Internet is people, one big social network, and users no longer have to worry about how they connect. We can all get on with communicating and collaborating in contextually appropriate ways. In this talk, I'll discuss how to build a decentralized, user-centered w
PubCasts: subscribe to publications through RSS
This is inspired by the iBooks launch, but it’s applicable to any ereader that uses the ePub format. (Or, indeed, it could use any ebook format – MobiPocket, Kindle, DAISY, etc.) A podcast is just an RSS feed with a file enclosure – part of the RSS standard – that points to an MP3 file. Similarly, video podcasts point to video files. An obvious evolution, then, is the pubcast: periodical publications delivered through RSS feeds. Free publication subscriptions In the free case, a user would si
The death of newspapers, and why it matters
The Internet has, undeniably, changed our culture. For most of the 20th century, we paid for our news, entertainment, art and literature. We allowed businesses to act as gatekeepers for this content, and accepted that the media landscape would be dictated by decisions made in the boardroom. Publishers, movie studio bosses, broadcasters and record company executives dictated what we read, saw and heard, based on financial projections. Their opinions about what was commercially viable regulated s