Archives 2005-1014: News
If the Web can be considered in cosmological terms, then right about now we're in the infinite nanosecond after the Big Bang, an inflationary moment when all that matter spreads itself out. Now things start to coalesce. New technologies and faster connectivity are at work, as is the gravity of financial pressure. In five years thousands of media jobs have come into existence. Headlines that once surprised -- "Net Draining Talent from Print Media" -- seem familiar. New journalistic content is... MORE
A long, long time ago -- the spring of 1999 -- it seemed as if the Internet had sprinkled financial pixie dust upon the publishing industry. Publications that had only been around for a couple of years, like TheStreet.com and CBSMarket Watch.com, were entering the stock market with smashing success. The market transformed mere Webzines into "Internet content companies" worth as much as a billion dollars. Individual reporters and editors, some barely thirty years old, were said to be worth... MORE
In the last few years the conventional wisdom has been that the advent of the new media will hasten the demise of print. That newspapers will die as readers get more information from the Internet; magazines will be overwhelmed by the proliferation of inexpensively-produced, niche-oriented sites and Webzines; bound books will be replaced by digitalized e-books. That the culture of print, in short, will soon be a thing of the past. But I wonder whether this confuses the content with the... MORE
When Wall Street Journal reporter Kara Swisher spoke at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism last year, she called online journalists "linkalists" -- a joke, she insists, though some didn't find it funny. That may be because "linkalism" creates not only opportunities for new kinds of journalism but new challenges in setting and holding to journalistic standards, challenges that the world of new media is only beginning to wrestle with. Online journalists say that most discussions about... MORE
Whatever else Lou Boccardi is doing as head of the world's largest newsgathering organization, he reads the wire. Obsessively. He reads it on his computer at his New Rochelle home in the mornings before work. All day, an old-style wire printer buzzes and whines in a tiny closet in his corner office on the seventh floor of the Associated Press headquarters at 50 Rockefeller Plaza, spitting out the daily report. Whatever he hasn't read by the time he catches the evening train home -- often a... MORE
This spring, when much of the national news media had become all Elián, all the time, their audience was very familiar. Fully 61 percent of the core audience for the Elián González story were the same dedicated viewers, readers, and listeners who followed news of the plane crash last July that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. The links don't stop there. No less than 73 percent of those drawn to news about Kennedy's tragic death had been close observers of news about the untimely death of another,... MORE
In a 6 June 2000 letter to Home Affairs Minister Lal Krishna Advani, RSF expressed concern about the adoption by the Lower House of Parliament of a law on Internet use, and the presentation of a bill concerning terrorist activities. According to Robert Ménard, the organisation's secretary-general, "these two laws contain some clauses which are in contradiction with India's international commitments, and especially the United Nations' International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which... MORE
IT'S NOT EASY getting into the Pentagon, even if you've got a row of medals on your chest. So Military.com reporter Stephen Trimble shouldn't be so surprised at the hearty congratulations he's been getting for being the first online journalist granted a press pass there. "We definitely had to jump through hoops," says Trimble, who applied for the pass before the military news site had launched on March 27. The Pentagon had had no policy in effect for granting press credentials specifically to... MORE
SOMEDAY SOON, writes Time Inc. Editor at Large Daniel Okrent, the jig will be up for news on paper. The combined magic of digital, satellite and cellular technology will enable journalists to beam text and images to readers and viewers anytime, anywhere, via portable personal information appliances, he wrote last December in a commentary widely circulated on the Internet. Readers will like it, but advertisers will absolutely adore it, he believes: "[With] a truly interactive medium...the... MORE
THERE IS SOMETHING THAT'S still overwhelming about jumping on the Internet and opening up the enormous library that's online. Everyone has a personal site favorite. Mine is thetrip.com, which allows you to track every commercial airplane flight that's in the sky, in real time, on a map with altitude, air speed and estimated time of arrival. If that's not a gee-whiz, what is? Or how about the one--dmv. state. va.us--that shows the average waiting time by hour and day of the week if you're a... MORE
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