There’s plenty to discuss in James Fallows’ excellent Atlantic piece on how Google plans to save the news industry. It has some good background on what’s hurting the industry, notes that hard news never made money, touches on un-bundling and re-bundling (aggregating), and plenty more. I want to briefly highlight two points. First, Google is …
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Sachs on our policy discourse
Economist Jeffrey Sachs has a column in Scientific American complaining about the dismal state of policy discourse in the U.S. In general, our political system regularly puts around the table people who are not the best equipped to find deep solutions to our problems. Certainly it has also done so on climate change, with the …
Civics vs. culture
A friend objected to my post Subsidizing the Style section on the grounds that I was discounting the social value of newspapers’ cultural content. Fair enough. The Times, and newspapers more generally, obviously contribute to our cultural conversation and that’s important. But if tomorrow newspapers disappeared entirely which would suffer more: our civic discourse or …
Subsidizing the Style section
Last post I wrote about my hesitancy to pay for The New York Times, despite being a loyal, regular reader. I’d rather be asked to donate to keep quality journalism publicly available than forced to pay to privately consume it. In this post I want to touch on another reason why I’m hesitant to pay …
Just ask nicely
Despite being a huge fan of the New York Times, I’m reluctant to subscribe when the paper institutes its paywall. There are a couple of reasons for that, but in this post I’ll focus on just one: I’d rather be asked to support good journalism than forced to pay for it. Being asked to support …
Social media, email and relationship inflation
Umair Haque has a post at Harvard Business Review advancing the following hypothesis which he dubs “relationship inflation”: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn’t connecting us as much as we think it is. It’s largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships. A year ago I was blogging …
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Too many cooks, too many kitchens
Imagine a society in which kitchens are rare. No one has one in their home. Everyone has to go out to eat three meals a day. As a result, the society employs quite a large number of professional chefs to work in the few large kitchens, cooking food for everyone else. Now imagine that technological …
The problem with political journalism
George Packer may not be right about Twitter, but he’s right on in his assessment of political journalism. In this blog post he calls out specific writers in specific pieces for focusing entirely on political performance and perception. Importantly, he puts this sort of empty journalism side-by-side substantive reporting on other issues in order to …
Why go to TED?
It may seem like a stupid question. Why not go to TED, if you could? It’s full of brilliant and influential people. And celebs, if you’re into that. Anyone who’s ever watched a TED talk knows how thought-provoking they are and how addictive watching them can become. So why not go to TED? Well this …
Beyond time I started blogging…
I’ve been putting this off for far too long. It’s been well over a year that I’ve been looking for an outlet to share my thinking and reading on how the internet is changing human communication and collaboration. But I kept delaying diving in. I wanted more than just a blog – I wanted a …
beyond the times 