February 17, 2013 – 9:58 pm
Tweet The survival of quality news calls for a new approach to writing and reporting. Inspiration could come from blogging and magazine storytelling and also bring back memories of the 70′s New Journalism movement. News reporting is aging badly. Legacy newsrooms style books look stuck in a last Century formalism (I was tempted to write [...]
November 11, 2012 – 6:46 pm
Tweet Legacy media suffer from a deadly DNA mutation: they’ve lost their appetite for competition; they no longer have the will to fight the hordes of new, hungry mutants emerging from the digital world. For this week’s column, my initial idea was to write about Obama’s high tech campaign. As in 2008, his digital team [...]
TweetThis is a story of pride vs. geekiness: Traditional newspapers that move online are about to lose the war against pure players and aggregators. Armed with the conviction their intellectual superiority makes them immune to digital modernity, newspapers neglected today’s internet driving forces: relying on technology to build audiences and the ability to coalesce a [...]
TweetPaul Steiger is one of the men I admire the most in my profession. Five years ago, at the age of 65, and after a 16-year tenure as the Wall Street Journal’s managing editor, he seized the opportunity to create a new form of investigative journalism. Steiger created ProPublica, a non-profit newsroom dedicated to the [...]
TweetFifteen years ago, Louis Gallois, the SNCF (French Railways) chairman decided to change the company’s lexicon: passengers were to be referred to as “customers” instead of the old bureaucratese “users” (in French: “clients” vs. “usagers”). The intent was to convey notions of choice and consideration for the rider. This being France, the edict led to [...]
March 19, 2012 – 12:20 am
TweetThis weekend, my ritual readings were dominated by corporate media culture issues: How to transition from the legacy media culture to the more agile and chaotic digital world? I’ve been reading up on this topic — and sometimes conferencing about it — for years. But, to my surprise, over time, I’ve been feeling lectured on [...]
December 18, 2011 – 11:00 pm
TweetWhen it comes to cracking the digital media code, 2011 involved more testing than learning. Media companies seem to be locked in a feverish search mode. Their sense of urgency is reinforced by the continuous depletion of worldwide fundamentals: digital advertising’s encephalogram remains flat (at best); and when audiences grow, revenues do not necessarily correlate. [...]
December 11, 2011 – 10:43 pm
TweetI love talking about the things I enjoy using. The emerging ecosystem in which a bunch of smart people curate long form journalism is definitely one of those things. The companies are called Instapaper, Longreads, Longform. I love the material they find for me and I’m in the debt of developers who wrote neat applications [...]
September 11, 2011 – 7:18 pm
TweetThe TechCrunch / Arrington saga is the perfect illustration for the stealthy corruption plaguing digital information. Skip this paragraph if you know the story. In a nutshell: on September 1st, Michael Arrington, founder of the site TechCrunch, announced the launch of a venture fund (Fortune broke the story). Rather small token by Silicon Valley standards: [...]
September 4, 2011 – 7:55 pm
TweetTo cover American politics, Politico deploys an editorial staff of 150. This is more than any news organization in the United States for the same beat. It all started five years ago: a niche website launched by three seasoned political reporters who sharpened their claws in mainstream medias. As envisioned by John Harris, Jim VandeHei [...]
