I began catching up with events in Mumbai Wednesday at 1:00am in a Kiev hotel room. I started with frenzied remote control shuttling between CNN and  SkyNews (no BBC world, which I prefer). The same stuff everywhere. Fuzzy footage of the carnage, so-called experts on the phone with the host, etc. At the same time, [...]

Remember Adam Smith, the man who coined The Market’s Invisible Hand phrase, the author of The Wealth of Nations? He gave rise or, rather, a voice to a philosophy of laissez-faire, of as little government intervention as possible.  In his view, the forces in presence, buyers and sellers, producers and consumers would always end up [...]

(To the usual readers of the Monday Note: this is a special entry compiling notes and links relevant to the consultation held by the French government about the future of the press — hence the French language).
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Articles et liens en relation
avec les discussions du groupe “Presse & Internet”
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Voici une liste d’articles parus dans [...]

Two recent experiences made me pick Copyright as this week’s topic. The first one took place ten days ago at the Monaco Media forum. Professor Lawrence Lessig delivered a compelling presentation covering the evolution of copyright. The second experience happened at a consultation on the future of the press held by the French government where [...]

Here, meaning in Silicon Valley, we’re not waiting for Obama – even if we look forward to his injecting physical and psychological stimuli in our economy. A week ago, our President-elect was politely spinning the “there’s only one President” line, meaning he didn’t want to interfere with Bush’s struggle to right the ship.  But, this [...]

Death reports of paid-for models on the Internet have been greatly exaggerated. Granted: the network’s genome carries the “free” nucleotide.  As in both freedom and free goods and services. Like it or not, its publicly funded origins (universities and the Pentagon) led to the emergence of widely adopted services such as search engines or Wikipedia.  [...]

Here is how Tom Friedman ends his 11/11/08 New York Times column:
“Lastly, somebody ought to call Steve Jobs, who doesn’t need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he’d like to do national service and run a car company for a year. I’d bet it wouldn’t take him much longer [...]

What a ride! On December 24, 2007, for the customary but risky New Year prediction game, I wrote: “Barack Hussein Obama will be elected the 44th President of the United Sates of America on November 4, 2008. Why? Because he’s smart, he’s new, he’s clean, he’s authentic and because he is, by any measure, the [...]

On November 4th, watching the election results at home in Palo Alto, I’ve seen tears in the eyes of reputedly and professionally cynical French people assembled for the momentous occasion.  We were proud of the country that hosts us and adopts us in its generous melting pot tradition.  Now, we are prouder, even, of its [...]

With the violently agitated context of so many platforms and of a potentially unlimited supply of agents, how do we update the definition of journalism? Where do craft or trade begin, where do they end? Inevitably, the profession reacts by circling the wagons, hoping to hold its own against hordes of writers now fragmenting what [...]