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Google & the Newspaper Crisis

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This morning Wired’s Epicenter blog is running an interesting piece: Five Things Google Could Do For Newspapers. There’s some pretty interesting stuff in there, but my fear is that all of the suggestions are merely handwaving unless papers deal with the real problem – they don’t actually print enough real news. Newspapers made bets in the 90s and into the 00s that served (essentially) to divest themselves of the business of publishing the news, in many cases preferring wire services for the majority of news content. What (many) newspapers have become are reprinters of wire copy padded by a myriad of opinion, editorial, and marginally ethical fluff “journalism”.

What Google should do is to set up a fund to help struggling newspapers re-staff their news divisions and a deeply discounted consulting wing to help owners – who have made the bad decisions that got us where we are today – understand that their only real commercial value springs from factual reporting.

Looking back at Wired 1.1

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In his blog Fimoculous, Rex Sorgatz takes a look back at Wired 1.1, which came out 15 years ago this month.

I caught up with Wired at # 1.2, the Crypto Rebels issue, which I bought at a newsstand on Rideau Street in Ottawa. I was already familiar with both Mondo 2000 and the original bOING bOING zine, but that’s not to say that seeing the same kind of material in a clearly more mainstream magazine wasn’t pretty cool.

I wouldn’t say that Wired changed my life – as far back as 1.2 people who were involved in the culture Wired covered were (often rightly) critical of the magazine. But within a year I was in the world that Wired was all about – I had moved to Montreal and was working at CTHEORY, immersed in some of the earliest online publishing and (elsewhere) web community activity.

It’s kind of hard to believe it has been 15 years.

Followup about Anderson and the PR folks

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At the beginning of last week, Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and the Editor-in-Chief of Wired, announced that he was permanently blocking the email addresses of PR people who had sent him inappropriate email and published a list of those addresses. The post garnered a lot of attention, and a couple of days later (Nov. 1) he posted a followup: PR Blockage: The Aftermath. Definitely worth a read if you have any involvement with media relations.

Via Wired News:

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Via Wired News:

The Wired 40 for 2005. Lots of big companies with big ideas here. Proof positive that the next big thing may come from one of the bigcos – but not a guarantee of that by any stretch of the imagination.

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