One Flew Over the Cubicle's Nest

Shaking up the Old News Media

So now, with the New York Times caving in and offering their content for free, it's down to the Wall Street Journal (at least among big U.S. news providers) as the last holdout. Rupert Murdoch is already dropping big hints that he will follow suit, ending the Journal's 11 year paid subscription run, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal. Don't expect this to save the old news media, however--major surgery may be required.

  Murdoch has suggested that making the WSJ.com free would bring in enough advertising revenue to offset the lost subscription revenues (the Journal generated at least $50 million in subscription revenues last year, say sources close to the paper). He's envisioning a website reaching tens of millions of people around the clock. But the logic is a bit of a stretch. According to the article the site would have to generate over 20 million unique visitors monthly vs 8.3 million monthly now--that's a big jump.  Meantime the explosive online advertising growth is slowing some.

Yet the paper may have no choice.Newspapers are caught in the perfect storm. Print viewers are declining steadily--sometimes I feel like the only one around reading a newspaper anymore (don't even ask my kids). Competition is coming from every direction--cable tv, iPods, and so on. Meantime, the Internet has turned into a giant information machine and started leveling the playing field, making the big boys like the New York Times compete in new ways.

Myth of the Web Potato (Fortune Magazine)

  Fortune's Brent Schlender raises some interesting points in his recent (Feb.7) column Dawn of the Web Potato  First off: consumer demand on the web is beginning to outstrip commercial and government usage. So heavy is the consumer use that some are predicting we could be heading into brownouts.

Much of this is being driven by video--and it goes beyond "stupid pet tricks" on YouTube, as he says.Video is exploding across the Internet in many forms, a thousand points of light to (badly) paraphrase a former president. In North America online video transmission has jumped to 18% of all Internet traffic in 2007, from 7% in 2005, and will grow tenfold by 2011, according to a Cisco study.

The article concludes that we're becoming a nation of "web potatoes." Presumably much like the TV generation, this one spends the bulk of his/her time scanning a screen for stuff from the comforts of their office or home, or so this argument goes. When everything, including TV, winds up on your computer screen, you end up with a nation of zombies viewing content, passive as ever.   

But this comparison quickly breaks down when you analyze the facts: indeed, the Internet era is shaping up as the antithesis of TV's couch potato era. While there's plenty of passive viewing going on, today's Net user is far different than the old couch potato.

Cool organizing, search tools

I must admit as a former writer-journalist, I'm one of those legacy closet print readers, hanging on to my old newspaper and magazines to help me ferret out my news. But in recent months, days go by when I don't even pick up a newspaper or magazine (with a few exceptions, such as the Wall Street Journal, Wired and FAst Company). The web is far too compelling...and now more practical.

One of my favorite new tools is  del.icio.us  , which allows you to organize your bookmarks by tags. This makes them much more easier to organize and find. I'm not even sure how I managed before it..always seemed to be losing my bookmarks, or drowning in too many. This simplifies the process.
As far as searches, Google  Reader is the new kid on the block--and it's a good one. The news reader tool allows you to compile neat folders of your news and blogs, and views hundreds of headlines in quick fashion. Try it at Google Reader . The last one is an old standby, but still worth noting, the personalized Google home page. This allows you to personalize your news and other feeds into a sort of personalized newspaper. I created several different pages or "tabs," one for News; one for blogs; one for finance; and one misc (with cool tools and plug ins). I'll add one for technology later. You can plug in your own URLs and/or Google provides hundreds of news feeds, and assorted other feeds, ranging from world time clocks to iPod downloads to live traffic reports to the Budhist thought of the day. The thought for Sat, Sept. 30th:
"Decay is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence."
Think about that for a few minutes.