listening to the wind pull the barn door off its hinges.
//
listening to the wind pull the barn door off its hinges.
Month: December 2008
Good grief! If newspapers stop printing, what will I use to wrap all the Christmas gifts?
I’m embarrassed to say that since college… I’ve been so busy speechwriting for Kerry and then Barack that I haven’t been reading all the good literary stuff I used to read…
~Jon Favreau
NOTES:
1) Mark Warren, “What Obama’s 27-Year-Old Speechwriter Learned From George W. Bush,” Esquire, accessed December 20, 2008, https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a5339/barack-obamas-speech-writer-1208/
Seth on the death of the personal blog
From BlogAsheville:
Many local bloggers have neglected their blogs recently, with varying reasons/excuses.
So, do bloggers need a bailout too? No. Read Seth’s take on the personal blog demise:
There’s a difference between a blog about YOU… and a blog about the reader. Guy Kawasaki’s blog, and my blog for that matter, are not about us, about what we ate yesterday or how great we are. They are about you, the reader.
I guess there’s an easy analogy:
Your blog could be like a newspaper (written by a staff)
or it could be like a book (written by an author)
So, enough about me. How about you?
The point is not to show up on a list, the point is to start a conversation that spreads, to share ideas and to chronicle your thinking.
//
i know, i know. my inbox is filling up. i left a book at a clients office. press proofs were delivered. and, yes, i will call you.
//
kidlinger calls and says, ‘when you coming home… i’m making chocolate chip pancakes.’ AWRsome! who needs to work when thar’s pancakes?
//
isn’t there something larger than a venti?
//
i think i saw every hour of the night. oh, insomnia, thy name is kidlings.
//
crazy, i can’t sleep, though it’s been a busy day. i’ll try reading a philosophy book on the topic of tradition which i just acquired.
//
you know you’re from wisconsin when you walk outside, it’s 29 degrees, and you tell those inside; “yeah, it’s a bit chilly this morning.”
GPOYW
(courtesy Adobe Illustrator Live Trace feature).
//
nothing better than a 2 mile hike in 20 degree weather to make me feel at home.
The (read) sky (between) is (the) falling (lines)
AdAge.com opens an article with these dismal facts:
Newspaper ad revenue fell almost $2 billion in the third quarter for a record 18.1% decline, according to new statistics from the Newspaper Association of America. What’s worse, newspapers’ online ad revenue fell for the second quarter in a row.
In another, companion article titled “Huffington Post More Valuable Than Some Newspaper Cos.,” AdAge.com offers this regarding blog value versus newspaper value:
The [$100 million] funding means Arianna Huffington’s news blog is now considered more valuable by its backers than quite a few publicly traded newspaper companies…
The irony is that The Huffington Post “rarely provide original content” (to quote myself) but “select and repackage… information.”
In a CJR piece by Robert Kuttner with an urgent deck that reads “Newspapers have a bright future as print-digital hybrids after all — but they’d better hurry,” he writes of an interview with a 21-year old colleague. In their conversation he attempts to establish an argument in defense of the printed newspaper. Mr. Kuttner writes:
By now I was feeling very last century. And then Ezra… handed me a trump. You have one thing right, he volunteered. The best material on the Internet consistently comes from Web sites run by print organizations.
My take away is this:
- Newspapers that don’t adapt to the print-digital hybrid should go the way of the buffalo.
- Newspapers that embrace the print-digital hybrid should do so quickly and reorganize as a news organization using the full depth of the new media platform. After all, newspapers are content providers who have been relying on a single (print) platform too long.
- The Huffington Post is funded. In a little known interview, the publisher of World magazine made the following statement:
As public companies that do most of the news-gathering cut back on their investments… We see an opportunity to increase news resources in the non-profit world. We may be looking at a paradigm shift in this industry from for-profit news-gathering to non-profit news-gathering.
Is the “broken windows theory” of social behavior correct?
Jason Kottke, “Does the broken windows theory hold online?” Dec 1, 2008, kottke.org, accessed Apr 29, 2026, https://kottke.org/08/12/does-the-broken-windows-theory-hold-online
Coffeehouse Junkie 