Archive for the 'Business' Category

Newspaper Is Not The “One Medium To Rule Them All”

Published by Jarred on February 11, 2009 in Business, Culture, News and Web 2.0. Comments

Reminder: I speak for myself and not for my employer.

Late last month, the New York Times ran an op-ed by David Swensen and Michael Schmidt called “News You Can Endow.” It begins with this quote from Thomas Jefferson:

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right. [...] And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.”

And then, ominously, the authors declare:

“Today, we are dangerously close to having a government without newspapers. [...] If Jefferson was right that a well-informed citizenry is the foundation of our democracy, then newspapers must be saved.”

I’ve done enough LSAT logical reasoning questions to recognize a broken argument when I see it.  I could hash it out, but I much prefer passive aggressive analogies.  Let’s say that Jefferson also wrote that the basis of commerce is the efficient movement of goods.  Today, however, we are dangerously close to having an economy without carriages.  Oh noes!  If Jefferson was right that excellent transportation is the foundation of our economy, then carriages must be saved!  Dunno about you, but I’m pretty sure the CEO of FedEx would disagree.

Swensen and Schmidt go on to argue that turning newspapers into non-profit organizations funded by endowments “would enhance newspapers’ autonomy while shielding them from the economic forces that are now tearing them down.”  In other words, they believe that because newspapers are not surviving the market economy with their current business model, they should — instead of adapting to consumer demand and concentrating on moving their operations online — forgo a business model altogether and become self-sufficient institutions that are immune to the desires of their audience.  I’ll give you a few seconds to apply and enjoy the carriage analogy here.

Of course, as Michael Masnick at Techdirt points out, Jefferson wasn’t really talking about newspapers as a medium, but newspapers as an implementation of journalism (just as — if my invented quote were true — he would probably have been talking about transportation, and not just carriages).  Doesn’t Jefferson’s quote really imply that, if anything, a citizenry who could be informed frequently, and even in real time, would be better off than one who only received news in a single, diurnal, static form?  To put it simply: wouldn’t Jefferson have been in favor of ditching newspapers for online news?

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Breaking The News

Published by Jarred on December 31, 2008 in Business and News. Comments

I told myself that, this time, I really wasn’t going to blog about it.  As with my recent post on the future of writing, I felt that there is sometimes too much hyperbole about the Web tolling the bell for familiar habits and industries… and that I had done my fair share of furthering the exaggerated panic.  This time, though, is a little different.

Newspapers are dying.

This isn’t particularly breaking news: I remember discussing the topic in 2005 during a French class in Paris.  The competition for French newspapers like Le Monde at that time was coming mostly from the free alternatives that were available on the street and in the Metro.  Several American papers were quick to see this trend, and began to offer a free mini version of their full paper; the Washington Post Express, for example, is popular with commuters in D.C.  Today, however, the newspaper industry’s number one enemy is — surprise surprise — the Internet.  The speed with which readers are moving from getting their news in print to finding it online is bringing the industry’s predicament to a nasty head.

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Lala: Send Your Music To The Cloud

Published by Jarred on December 9, 2008 in Apple, Business, Music, Social Networks and Web 2.0. Comments

There are a whole lot of companies and products trying to be “The Next Big Thing” in digital music.  Apple’s iTunes is clearly dominant these days, a combined result of its deep (and sometimes exclusive) catalog offerings, easy-to-use software, and killer hardware lineup.  Add to that the tight integration between those three, and you truly have a killer combo.  Amazon seems to have posed the biggest challenge to the Apple machine so far, competing agressively with lower prices (around $0.79/track and $5.00/album as opposed to $0.99 and $9.99 respectively for Apple) as well as DRM-free tracks.  One area in which both Apple and Amazon have failed to innovate, however, is universal accessibility to your music.

The Problem

First, let me describe my music set-up and listening habits:

  • My music, currently totaling 4,415 tracks, lives on my laptop’s hard drive.  That corpus of music is duplicated in its entirety in two other places: my backup hard drive, and on my iPod.  I use my iPod primarily to play along with music on the drums, but also in the car through an audio-in jack.
  • Using a playlist, I’ve designated a subset of that music (right now, 850 tracks, or about 20% of my total collection) to sync onto my iPhone; when I walked/bused/metroed for an hour every day in D.C., this came in handy.  Now that I bike to work most days in about 15 minutes, I have a no-music commute.
  • While I could take my iPod to work and have all my music on hand, I know that inevitably I’ll leave it there one night and want it for the drums, or it’ll run out of juice and I won’t have a cord, or something.  And given that there seems to have been a rash of disappearing devices at work recently — including my G1 and a coworker’s iPod — I try to minimize the gadgetry I have (and perhaps accidentally leave) at the office.  So, until recently, I would just fire up Pandora.

So the biggest question I’ve faced with regards to music is this: “How do I access my entire collection of music remotely without having to bring along a separate device?”  Earlier this year, I tried a product from SimplifyMedia that let you listen remotely through iTunes (or the iPhone), but I encountered too much lag.  For the past month or two, however, I’ve been trying out a new service called Lala.  Lala is a completely web-based music jukebox and storefront.  While that’s pretty standard, the real beauty of Lala can be found in two key offerings: the Lala Music Mover and web-only purchases.

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A Sign of the Times: “Extra” Lets You Really Read All About It

Published by Jarred on December 5, 2008 in Business, News and Web 2.0. Comments

Too much wordplay in that title?  Nah.

Times Extra associates articles from across the web with NYT headlines

Times Extra associates articles from across the web with NYT headlines

In an interesting move, the New York Times has started to beta test a feature called “Times Extra” on their homepage (to try it out, click “Try Our Extra Homepage” to the right of the search box).  Once enabled, each headline will be accompanied by a box full of links to related stories across the web — be they from blogs or even rival newspapers.

The service is powered by Blogrunner, a service bought by the NYT sometime in 2005 (I briefly gushed about it in the opening paragraph of this post on the social graph back in January, but haven’t used it regularly since).  Blogrunner runs as its own service at blogrunner.com, but it has also been providing links on the NYT tech page since November 2007.  It uses a mix of computer algorithms and human editorial oversight to match and organize articles based on topic and theme.  For example, check out this clustering based on a NYT article about the Big Three, or this one based on the Official Google Blog post announcing the general availability of Friend Connect.

The step from geeky sidebar widget to a fairly prominent beta test on the latest and most important headlines is large and bold — and the management is fully aware of it, too.

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Here’s What I’m Thinking About

Published by Taylor on December 5, 2008 in Business, Consumer Behavior, Environment, Philanthropy, Politics and Social Entrepreneurship. Comments

Taking a page out of Ezra Klein’s playbook (and continuing our trend here of shamelessly copying features from other blogs…ahem), here are a few things I keep meaning to write about:

  • The NC legislature commissioned a study report by a few of the best environmental and public policy academics in the state to look at water quantity and allocation.  The report, currently in draft form (PDF), is very well done and a nice synthesis of policy and science.  Water quantity is not the sexiest issue, but after recent severe droughts I think more folks are starting to give water policy the attention it deserves.
  • The Acumen Fund invests in social enterprises around the world–businesses, generally operating at a below-market return for investors, that have as central tenets to their mission alleviating a social problem or improving lives of vulnerable populations.  A recent think piece by Acumen’s Chief Investment Officer, Simple Measures for Social Enterprise (PDF), is a good reminder for social investors and philanthropists alike that sometimes just capturing consistent and reliable data can lead to greater improvements than the thorough impact assessments we all think of as ideal.
  • I’ve been meaning to write about Nate Silver (creator and whiz behind fivethirtyeight.com) for a while.  Even though the election is long past, this NY Times profile is worth a look.
  • Speaking of the NY Times, this piece from the Magazine about the Netflix recommendation engine and the “Napoleon Dynamite problem” is fascinating (apparently Napoleon Dynamite is a love/hate kind of movie, and it’s nearly impossible to consistently predict whether someone will like it based on their other movie preferences).