Monthly Archives: August 2008
Newspapers are losing their social currency
I like Jack Shafer and this piece of his has some real resonance for me. He talks about how newspapers traditionally offered readers a form of social currency (explained more below) that's increasingly being lost to social networks such as Facebook. Not that long ago, the daily newspaper was an indispensable coiner of social currency, and it gave its readers piles of the stuff in each edition. The phrase, which comes from sociology, is often used to describe the information we acquire and then trade—or give away—to start, maintain, and nurture relationships with our fellow humans.
Mix and match magazine subscriptions
Mark Potts blogs on Recovering Journalist about a new model being adopted by magazines that’s worth taking a look at. The first one is Portfolio’s takeout on Maghound, Time Warner’s plan to turn magazine subscriptions into an a la carte business: basically, you’ll be able to decide which issues of which magazines you take on [...]
Posted in Business Models, Journalism Tagged Business Models, magazines, subscriptions Leave a comment
Newspaper executives: if you don’t use the web you’ll never understand it
I enjoyed this rant from music blog The Lefsetz Letter which has a go at newspaper executives who are "online ignorant, even if they can speak the language, they’ve got no insight, because they don’t utilize the damn thing". He starts by noting how cross newspaper executives are with the likes of TradeMe and CraigsList for stealing their lucrative classified ads (Fairfax bought TradeMe to get them back again, although whether they're properly leveraging the deal is another story).
Posted in Journalism, Newspapers, Social Media Tagged blogs, change management, news executives, Newspapers Leave a comment
AP to lose another customer