Last month, the American Booksellers Association published an open letter to the Justice Department, asking Justice to investigate Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon after they lowered prices of best-selling books to under $10. The threat, the ABA says, is dire: “If left unchecked, these predatory pricing policies will devastate not [...]
Jack Balkin invited me to be on a panel yesterday at Yale’s Information Society Project conference, Journalism & The New Media Ecology, and I used my remarks to observe that one of the things up for grabs in the current news environment is the nature of authority. In particular, [...]
Last week I gave a talk on newspapers at the Shorenstein center. (They did an amazing job with the transcript, including annotating the talk with a remarkable amount of linking.) During the talk, I ran through various strategies for funding local reporting, including an idea I first saw [...]
(My friend Nick gave a great graduation speech on Wednesday, at Columbia Journalism School. As Columbia hasn’t posted the speech themselves, I’m putting it up here. -clay)
Commencement 2009
Welcome, everyone, and warmest congratulations and good wishes to all our graduates and our families.
Columbia Journalism School is rapidly approaching [...]
In 1987, a teenage girl in suburban New York was discovered dazed and wrapped in a garbage bag, smeared with feces, with racial epithets scrawled on her torso. She had been attacked by half a dozen white men, then left in that state on the grounds of an apartment building. [...]
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; [...]
(Note: This is more backstory than post. I’m putting this here so I can refer to it later, because I’m tired of reconstituting these arguments one conversation at a time.)
As the internet destroys the local advertising monopoly previously enjoyed by newspapers, newspaper people are talking about radically altering their current [...]
With continued turmoil in the advertising market, people who work at newspapers and magazines are wondering if micropayments will save them, with recent speculation in this direction by David Sarno of the LA Times, David Carr of the NY Times, and Walter Isaacson in Time magazine. Unfortunately [...]
