There has never been a mass market for good journalism in this country. What there used to be was a mass market for print ads, coupled with a mass market for a physical bundle of entertainment, opinion, and information; these were tied to an institutional agreement to subsidize a modicum of real journalism. In that mass market, the opinions of the politically engaged readers didn’t matter much, outnumbered as they were by people checking their horoscopes. This suited advertisers fine; they have always preferred a centrist and distanced political outlook, the better not to alienate potential customers. When the politically engaged readers are also the only paying readers, however, their opinion will come matter more, and in ways that will sometimes contradict the advertisers’ desires for anodyne coverage.Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users « Clay Shirky (via infoneer-pulse)
(via futurejournalismproject)
Yes, we published a slideshow.
And here’s a list of why we don’t like Facebook’s Social Reader.
- “Frictionless” sharing is not so frictionless: To read the articles being shared, you must install the application. That leads right in to No. 2.
- Privacy: I don’t want everything I click on going to my News Feed. Especially when I click on something stupid…
- Social Reader is a wasteland of link bait: Take a look through our fantastic slideshow (you don’t even have to click through it!), and you’ll know what I mean.
Social Reader mostly dumps link bait on the News Feed, but on a rare occasion, an interesting headline pops up. Without installing the application, we can’t easily access the article. How does that help the news organizations that use the application? Our guess is more than a few people will skip Social Reader headlines for just these reasons.
We’re just ripe with irony today.
#partylikeajournalist A 20-inch, two-photo story in print is a 2-inch, 20-photo story online.(via partylikeajournalist)
(via partylikeajournalist)
A guide to wasting time on the web, courtesy of The Boston Globe.
We can happily say we haven’t so much as thought of half these sites in years. They didn’t even include Texts From Bennett or Ugly Renaissance Babies, or their own slideshow.
