September 19, 2010 – 6:58 pm
TweetNews aggregators have grown into all shapes and forms. Some are truly helping the producers of original content but others simply amount to mere electronic ransack. My daily media routine starts on Techmeme. It is a pure aggregator — actually an aggrefilter, as coined by Dan Farber, at the time editor-in-chief of Cnet, who recommended [...]
September 12, 2010 – 5:40 pm
TweetUnlike their dead tree ancestors, online publications provide an interesting view on what readers actually like. Most news sites have Most E-mailed, Most Viewed and Most Blogged or Most Commented lists. Some even propose Editor’s Picks. For today, I’ll share non-statistical findings, influenced, needless to say, by my personal reading habits. Let’s start with the [...]
September 6, 2010 – 6:47 am
TweetQuestions: should newswire agencies serve consumers – directly? And, to a broader extent, how does the current information shift impact the agencies’ future? Two recent events lead me to explore these questions in today’s Monday Note. The first one is rather significant: last week, Associated Press announced a deal with Google allowing the search engine [...]
TweetWithin two weeks, the French newspaper Le Monde will run out of cash. By this Monday at noon, candidates to the takeover of the most prestigious French daily will have disclosed their offers. By June 28, the staff will vote and make the final decision for the fate of the 66 years-old paper. More importantly, [...]
TweetHow does Google’s unchallenged domination of Search shape the way we retrieve information? Does Google flatten global knowledge? I look around, I see my kids relying on Wikipedia, I watch my journalist students work. I can’t help but wonder: Does Google impose a framework on our cognitive processes, on the way we search for and [...]
TweetLet’s fire a few missiles at politically correct ideas such as “Digital media makes all of us journalists”, “citizens will soon displace professional reporters”, and so on. That’s nonsense (I have more explicit words in mind). Does it means public input in news should be kept at bay? Certainly not. Quite the contrary, actually. Newsrooms [...]
TweetOver the last month, I’ve been stuffing my iPad with books purchased online, long PDF files and other documents for later reading sessions. I’m waiting for the mind-blowing media applications, they’re still in the making. Several prototypes of French newspapers I have seen are quite promising. We have to be patient. This is just the [...]
TweetCoincidence. At the same time as the Russian billionaire Alexandre Lebedev was finalizing the acquisition of the British paper The Independent, France-Soir was relaunched with great fanfare and money from another oligarch, Sergey Pugachyov. It is not a coincidence, it is an emerging pattern. A terrible one. In which huge amounts of money of questionable origin [...]
TweetThis is the second part of a series about the evolution of print media. Part I here. A few years ago, the founder of the French daily Liberation was asked what he would do if he had unlimited resources to run his paper: “I would do a magazine everyday”, he said. During the late 80′s, [...]
February 14, 2010 – 11:46 pm
TweetFor publishers: How much money is lost because of stolen contents? Of that, how much can be realistically reclaimed? Before getting into numbers, an overview. In recent weeks, I’ve gained a first-hand media perspective on anti-piracy technology. The technology is Attributor’s, and the media is Agence France-Presse, one of the big three global newswires along [...]
