I’m back home after another “interesting” adventure in healthcare, the removal of my gallbladder. We arrived at the hospital to discover that the surgery had been cancelled. What? Long story short, there was another Terry Heaton who got his gallbladder removed a week earlier. After some fancy footwork by my doctor (”We can fix this”), the deed was done. I had trouble getting out of recovery, but that was rectified with a catheter, and I was on my way. Not such a good night, but I’m home and it’s over.
The Princeton Press announced this week that it would be offering hundreds of its textbooks via Amazon’s Kindle electronic book reader for students who’d rather buy electronic books than carry around the big printed versions. Yale University Press and Oxford University Press already have a similar presence for students. The University of California Press recently had about 40 of its volumes placed on Kindle and is ramping up.
According to an article in Inside Higher Ed, image-heavy textbooks aren’t conducive to the Kindle, but everything else is moving in that direction.
The university presses participating in Kindle were reluctant to describe the specific financial arrangements they have with Amazon (which also declined to discuss them), but said that they were revenue-sharing deals, and that preparing the books for release on Kindle was not particularly burdensome or expensive.
But here’s the mystery: the Kindle editions don’t come much cheaper than the always expensive standard college texts. Most of the electronic offerings run just a few bucks less than their printed counterparts.
This is yet another example of a traditional form of media trying to hang onto a revenue stream that cannot be justified by the technology that provides it in a different format. The cost of making a printed book is significant. It costs pennies (if anything) to duplicate a digital file, but the textbook industry is enormous (and authors of textbooks can make a pretty penny). It won’t separate itself from all that money easily.
But this is exactly the kind of scenario that produces disruptions, and it should be fun to watch.
The kidney stone blasting went well, and despite a couple of painful bouts of passing remnants yesterday, I’m doing well.
This is a good thing, because I get to do the whole surgical prep thing again tomorrow. It really is amazing to me that one minute you’re being wheeled into an operating room, and the next minute you’re waking up in recovery — or so it seems. As surgical procedures go, neither of these are biggies, which is why they’re letting me combine them into the same week.
Tomorrow is the gallbladder surgery, and I’ll celebrate the fourth with a Law & Order marathon on TNT (and my pain meds).
The coming week is going to be, well, interesting for yours truly.
Tuesday: Kidney stones blasted with sound waves. General anesthetic.
Wednesday: Painful cyst removed from my wrist. Local anesthetic.
Thursday: Gallbladder removal surgery. General anesthetic.
These procedures will all take place at different locations. It’s an insurance thing. Hence, I’ve gone through pre-op at two different hospital, sharing only a few of the tests. I have multiple specialists, their separate offices, and drugs galore.
I’m only a little anxious, but what’s been crystal clear to me as an observer of life is the need for a single medical database with multiple entry points. It would save billions and dramatically increase efficiency within the healthcare system (although it might cost a lot of jobs). Imagine if I carried a little device with my data and simply plugged it in at each place. No more forms. No redundant testing. Everybody would know my history, my drug regimen and pending appointments, regardless of when or where they were scheduled.
Of course, there’s the whole privacy thing, but let me tell you as a guy who is shelling out $3,000 in insurance deductibles this week that the benefits vastly outweigh the negatives. We simply MUST get a handle on healthcare costs, or only those who can afford treatment will get it.
In other words, kind of like what we have today, although the line keeps moving northward every year as insurance companies raise their rates and deductibles get higher.
The inescapable reality of doing business online as a local media company is that Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and a host of other pureplay internet companies are our competition. With six of every ten local online ad dollars going to these pureplays, we’re slowly being squeezed into a shrinking corner reserved for local content companies. Local media companies may say they believe this, but few behave as though it impacts them, because we’re convinced we’re in the content business. We’re not; we’re in the advertising business.
A couple of announcements over the past week by Google ought to have the attention of anybody in the online advertising business. Last week, the company unveiled “Google Trends,” an application that helps publishers compare how they’re doing against online competition. This week, Google revealed “Ad Planner,” software designed to show advertisers where to put their money based on where their target audiences visit. Together, these new moves put the squeeze on all of the incumbent players in the online advertising world, include online measurement giants comScore and Nielsen.
At first glance, these new applications seem enormously helpful to all web denizens. After all, the lack of a reliable third-party measurement system is one of the things agencies say is holding back the advertising floodwaters. And since both applications provide information about the whole Web, this appears to be just Google being useful Google. We applaud their brilliance and go about our daily routines thankful for all these tools that Google has provided.
But as I wrote last year in “Google Lifts Only Google,” the company’s efforts are all aimed at positioning itself to win. Google defines itself as an advertising system. To be sure, it’s a search engine, and its mission is to organize the world’s information, but when it comes to business, Google is an advertising system.
Google begins the day with the assumption that people come to the Web, because they’re looking for something. We begin the day with the assumption that people are looking for us. In our minds, we are the ones who control growth, because everything has to happen on what we view as our property. In the collective mind of Google, the people who make up the network that is the Web control the growth by their actions, and Google’s ad mechanism doesn’t care where that takes place. As the network grows, so grows Google. Not so for local media.
When I’ve noted that we MUST work to outdo Google at the local level, the immediate reaction is one of disbelief. After all, the thinking goes, Google already does a fantastic job of organizing local information, and we’re fooling ourselves if we think we can do better. But this argument presupposes that Google’s business is information organization. It isn’t. It’s an advertising system, and this is where we can beat them.
But how? Google knows that the real growth in online advertising is at the local level (so do the other pureplays), but it lacks one thing that local media companies have: feet on the street to sell its advertising system. The company has put sales forces in a few cities, but it needs a ubiquitous sales force in order to reach its goal of dominance. So the matter isn’t one of coming up with a better system or organizing information — or creating information portals — it’s coming up with a local advertising system that treats the Local Web as its platform.
Jeff Jarvis is writing a book tentatively called “What Would Google Do?” The idea came from various writings of his about this very topic. In one of the earliest, he wrote that we shouldn’t blame Google for leaving everybody else behind:
Big, old media handed them this opportunity on a platter. Google was the one company that truly understood the economics of the open network. It understood that it could grow much bigger enabling than controlling. We in media should have followed that model. We should have asked WWGD. What would Google do?
So the announcements over the past week about Google Trends and Google Ad Planner are good insofar as they can be used to help the online efforts we have with our brand extension sites and other content plays. We need reliable statistics, and the Ad Planner is likely to show advertisers that they want to spend money with us.
But let’s not be naive as to what’s really taking place here, because if we continue to look the other way, we’ll only have ourselves to blame as online advertising continues to grow while our share of the overall market doesn’t.
(Originally published in this week’s AR&D Media 2.0 Intel newsletter)
George: I’m surprised you let me in. After all, I haven’t exactly been kind to you guys of late.
St. Peter: You mean the jokes about religion and the anti-God stance you took down there?
George: Right.
St. Peter: Ha ha ha. We’ve had lots of laughs with you, George. Here’s our favorite.
(RECORDING OF CARLIN PLAYS) “Religion convinced the world that there’s an invisible man in the sky who watches everything you do. And there’s 10 things he doesn’t want you to do or else you’ll go to a burning place with a lake of fire until the end of eternity. But he loves you! ”
George: And you guys laughed at that?
St. Peter: But of course! You think you leave your sense of humor when you come up here? Besides, we understand that kind of bitterness better than most.
George: But, um, I don’t exactly believe in the invisible guy in the sky thing.
St. Peter: Doesn’t matter. We believe in you. Besides, you were more right than wrong. Sometimes I think we’re about as far from organized religion as the Pope is from Paris Hilton. Hee hee. Get it? It’s a joke, George.
George: You guys need some help up here.
St. Peter: Come on in. The old man’s waiting.
George (as they walk together into the clouds): Now, about that asshole Bush….
Jay Rosen has penned an important piece that articulates the conundrum for the professional press in a way that should help a lot of people understand what’s really taking place. He uses the metaphor of a migrating tribe to illustrate the problem:
Migration, which is easily sentimentalized by Americans, is a community trauma. Pulling up stakes and leaving a familiar place is hard. Within the news tribe some people don’t want to go. These are the newsroom curmudgeons. Others are in denial still, or they are quietly drifting away from journalism, or they are being shed as the tribe contracts and its economy convulses.
And like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them, when to leave, where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life, and which parts were well adapted to the old world but may be unnecessary or a handicap in the new. They have to ask if what they know is portable. What life will be like across the digital sea is of course an unknown to the migrant. This creates an immediate crisis for the elders of the tribe, who have always known how to live.
When I think of the press in these kinds of terms, I’m reminded of a wonderful speech that C.S. Lewis delivered at the University of London in 1944 called “The Inner Ring.” Lewis felt that the internal drive to be within certain closed societies was one of the great evils of humankind, and it describes Rosen’s “tribe” of the press perfectly.
The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain. And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the center of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.
Jay Rosen thinks it’s time we expanded the press and our ideas about it. How about breaking the inner ring to not only let the press out but everybody else in?
This weekend, Boyd added his considerable insight to a fascinating discussion that has grown out of Nick Carr’s provocative Atlantic Monthly article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Later, Scott Karp added his wealth of insight, and now Boyd. It’s a complex topic but boils down to Carr’s question about what’s happening with our his mind these days. He feels his mind shifting and doesn’t like it. Do yourself a favor and read all of the link references, beginning with Carr’s.
Karp elaborates on Carr’s premise by discussing the differences between absorbing knowledge in big chucks versus little chucks, and Boyd agrees with Karp that the answer to Carr’s question is a resounding “no.”
As I have been saying for years, the inherent conservatism of the mass media and other mass organizations (those that are based on one:many modes of communication, like government, religions, business, and so on) will lead them to say that this new sort of thinking is illegitimate: they war against it, saying that our new ways of talking and thinking and the social structures that they engender are bad, inferior, immoral, and stupid; and that those in favor of this web revolution are dumb, misguided, or evil fringe lunatics.
This is exactly the nut of the thing for me, too, but my take has always been the shift from the modernist, colonialist, hierarchical culture to the participatory, postmodernist, post-colonial culture. Traditionalists will love the concept of Google making people stupid, because it beautifully validates their illusions about knowledge and life and gives them a platform from which to point and say, “See? See?” It’s demagoguery, plain and simple, and I don’t believe for a minute that the cultural changes are “bad” for us. Does it make me feel uncomfortable? Perhaps, but that’s just fear of the unknown.
I’ve oft quoted my daughter Jenny, who at age seven got her first calculator (in the mid 70s). She asked me then, “If I have one of these, why do I need to study math?” Is she stupid, because her mind wants to explore other uses? If she uses her calculator, does that make her more stupid than one who doesn’t?
We’re always hearing how we humans only use 10 percent of our brains, but dammit, we sure seem to be comfortable with that. Why?
The ability to instantly deconstruct vastly complex arguments with a mouse click is certainly the enemy of a culture run by protected knowledge and absolute authorities, but it doesn’t follow that this means doom for humanity. Besides, cultural changes tend not to be “all or nothing,” so hierarchy of some form will always have its place.
I’m saddened this morning with the passing of my generation’s comedian, George Carlin. Comics, poets and artists are the prophets of contemporary culture, striking out against the status quo for its absurdities. Nobody did it better in my lifetime than Carlin. And when a modern prophet passes, we’ve all suffered a loss.
His most recent HBO specials were just a vapor of his real genius, and it was clear he was getting old (he was 71). But who of my generation isn’t? I wish he’d struck out against old age, but he didn’t, and his humor just wasn’t what it used to be. I hope his passing will result in an outpouring of some of his earlier and mid-career stuff, because this was a funny, funny man.
I loved George Carlin, and like most people my age, I use some of his stuff in everyday language. My favorite is: “These are the kinds of thoughts that kept me out of the good schools.”
The world is better for him having been here.
(UPDATE) I’ve been sitting here thinking about the cultural contributions of Carlin compared to Tim Russert. Will it be all-Carlin-all-the-time tonight?
Carlin’s brilliance was in his ability to call “bullshit” in the most unusual ways. Here’s a famous line from the “hippy-dippy weatherman:” Weather forecast for tonight: dark. Continued dark overnight, with widely scattered light by morning.
And as a nature lover, this was always one of my favorites: The caterpillar does all the work but the butterfly gets all the publicity.
I’ll bet the search engines are clogged with Carlin traffic today.
The statements by James Poniewozik of TIME in the entry below have been tugging at me ever since I read them, for Poniewozik has raised difficult questions for journalism.
I’ve written about this subject many times before, so regular readers here will know that I believe journalism is in good hands, can take care of itself, and that those who use the phrase “real journalism” to argue against any apparently “unreal” journalists are probably the least real of all. The institution of professional journalism, which is what’s being disrupted, is the fruit of Walter Lippmann’s elitist, social engineering dreams, so I’m not convinced it’s in need of saving. That belief, however, doesn’t merrily dismiss all that is professional. Like most things, this is not “all or nothing,” which is why I find Poniewozik’s statements so remarkable.
When people ask me to define a journalist, I always start with the first paragraph from the book of Luke:
Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, it seemed fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write {it} out for you in consecutive order, most excellent Theophilus; so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught.
In this sense, Luke is acting as a journalist. He didn’t have a degree from Medill, nor did he have a code of ethics by which to abide, only his investigation of eyewitness accounts and the events themselves. Now, you don’t have to believe the account to appreciate Luke’s role as a journalist, and this, I think, is the nut of the whole mess involving trust with contemporary journalism.
By and large, journalists of every stripe will tell you that they are in the pursuit of truth, and they resent ANY suggestion to the contrary. This supposes, however, that there is such a thing as objective truth in any matter, and therein lies the rub. In the above, Luke’s message to Theophilus is one of “exact truth,” and we all know where such absolutism has gotten us. So the best we can say is that Luke’s account was his best effort at that “truth,” and so it is with every journalist.
The problem, of course, in a postmodern world is that there are many variations of truth, and this is the very heart of the matter between professional journalism’s version of truth and that of the multi-perspective blogosphere. The more the Big-Js cling to their view of objective truth, the harder it’s going to be to sustain it, and the wider will grow the gap between a questioning public and the press.
And it is the public, after all, that controls journalism’s future.
Do yourself a favor and read this great piece by James Poniewozik of TIME on the shifting roles of the press and blogs. There are some extraordinary quotes in here that you’d never even have imagined a couple of years ago.
It’s too simple to say that the new media are killing off the old media. Interest in political news is sky-high, and new and old media each need the other to supply material and drive attention. What’s happening instead is a kind of melding of roles. Old and new media are still symbiotic, but it’s getting hard to tell who’s the rhino and who’s the tickbird.
…if 3 million people read Drudge and 65,000 read the New Republic, which is mainstream?
…maybe we’ll also stop arbitrarily dividing “real” from “amateur” journalists and simply distinguish good reporting from bad, informed opinion from hot air, information from stenography.
Well said, Mr. Poniewozik. Let’s hope your message makes its way up the ivory towers.
The AP has settled its case with The Drudge Retort and issued a remarkably vague statement about it this morning. Rogers Cadenhead, who runs The Drudge Retrort, writes that we’re headed for a Napster-like showdown in the matter. We won’t know until AP issues the “guidelines” it promised on Monday.
If AP’s guidelines end up like the ones they shared with me, we’re headed for a Napster-style battle on the issue of fair use…
…As a newspaper reader since age 8 and the spouse of an investigative reporter, I want the media to keep making enough money to afford the expensive and essential practice of journalism. I sure as hell don’t want to do all that reporting myself.
If AP’s core business is to report the news, blogs and social news sites send millions of people to its articles every day. Retort users have posted 41,000 links to news stories in the last four years, each link sending from 1,000 to 5,000 readers directly to a media site to read the article.
If its core business is to repackage the news, they’re in as much trouble as every other middleman on the web.
This is far from over, and I think the representatives of the citizen media movement are far better equipped to handle a big legal case than was Napster during its confrontation with the record industry. I’ll have more to say on this later.
I first became familiar with the term “critical mass” in the early 1980s as producer of The 700 Club. Most people don’t realize the extent to which the program and its founder, Pat Robertson, were driven by research. Little was left to chance back in my days there, which is why executives would occasionally gather at an enormous country house at the Homestead in the Virginia mountains to talk about culture and trends.
I remember one such occasion when our marketing director spoke of the rise of the remote control, and what it would mean once it reached 50 percent of the households with TV. Half of consumers is known as “critical mass,” a magical threshold that somehow validates the concept in the world of marketing. We all know what happened with the remote control, but now a new concept has crossed into validity — Web 2.0.
According to an article in Online Media Daily, the latest installment of an ongoing tracking study from Interpublic’s Universal McCann unit reveals that text messaging, blogging and social networking have reached critical mass, with more than half of all adults in the U.S. using one of these to communicate with friends, family, or colleagues on a regular basis. But the big story — and it is huge — is that nearly nine of ten in the age group 18-34 use these, making it the most dominant form of communications for the group.
Yet we wonder why traditional media methods of communicating are dying.
In ten years, this group will be 28-44, and the new 18-34 year old group will be even more socially connected.
Text messaging, meanwhile, proves that mobile media also is becoming a dominant source of personal communications beyond the cell phone, even if mass marketers haven’t yet figured out how to crack the potential of marketing through the medium. The percentage of U.S. adults who say they’ve never sent a text message fell to 41% this year from 49% a year ago. And among 18- to 34-year-olds, it dropped to 22% from 38%.
“Even if mass marketers haven’t yet figured out how to crack the potential of marketing through the medium?” Good grief, let’s hope that never happens. It would be like a phone call being interrupted for a brief commercial announcement.
Hopefully, I’ll be long gone before that ever reaches critical mass.
“These guys are good” is the slogan of the PGA Tour, but there are really two tours — the one when Tiger Woods participates and the one for events he passes on. Woods’ shocking announcement today that he’s done for at least the season due to knee surgery hurts professional golf more than it can ever admit. No British Open with Tiger. No PGA Championship. No Ryder Cup.
Who cares about tour number two, really?
I was fortunate to be old enough to enjoy the Palmer/Nicklaus era, as I’m fortunate today to witness the athletic phenomenon that is Tiger Woods. I used to enjoy all tour events before Tiger came along, but frankly, he’s so changed the game that a tournament without him is like watching the junior varsity. The PGA Tour has ridden his coattails to record financial years, and it will now have to do without him for at least the rest of this season. It’ll be interesting to see what happens, especially as the announcers struggle to make compelling TV without Woods.
May God bless Tiger Woods and bring him back whole.
Mark Cuban is his usual out-of-focus self with a post (Hulu is kicking Youtube’s ass) declaring Hulu the winner over YouTube. The problem, of course, is that these two companies are not now and have never been in competition, although Cuban thinks otherwise. To Mark, YouTube has always been about the theft of copyrighted material, so he never really bothers to examine what makes it hum.
It’s all about the money to Mark. A media business can only exist if its revenue model is built around scarce content, so he proclaims Hulu king and makes a prediction:
…by next year, not only will Hulu have more monetizable traffic than Youtube, but it will have more total revenues than Youtube as well. It wouldn’t sup rise (sic) me if they are already at a higher annual run rate than Youtube.
Here’s the thing. Mark’s probably right, but in thinking of YouTube only in sustainable business model terms, he misses the larger picture and continues to prove himself ignorant about the Web. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons to do things contrary to the P&Ls of the past, if they work towards a longer term return (why doesn’t Google sell ads on its home page?). He has always viewed YouTube through biased eyes (those damned thieves), and for a smart guy, he sure comes up short here.
“Youtube hides behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” he writes, as if its reason for being is to steal copyrighted material and profit from it. If it looks like a red herring and smells like a red herring, then it’s probably a red herring.
YouTube is about sharing, people sharing what they see and what they make, things we’ve been doing since before the term “media” referred only to the home of the Medes. In the 15th Century, the Roman Church didn’t want the Bible being shared with the laity, because they felt they “owned” it. I took my 45s with me to friends’ homes back in the 50s, so that they could hear the music too. Back then, the record industry knew that exposing people to the music was the best chance they had to sell another record.
YouTube’s tentacles within the personal media revolution go on for miles, because people don’t use it to view stolen goodies. Its business model hasn’t been written yet, and those who insist on looking for one just don’t have the patience to wait. I use YouTube to post videos that I’ve made on my MySpace page. There are lots of ways I could do that, but the Flip camera and YouTube make other options seem obsolete. How does YouTube gain from that? For one thing, they keep anybody else from charging fees or profiting from interruptive commercials, and in so doing, buy time for an acceptable business model to develop.
But that’s not the point. We’re in another Gutenberg moment here and the “church,” led by priests like Cuban, want absolute control over material the law tells them they own. I don’t think anybody objects to that concept, but the more people like Cuban press the matter, the more unseemly the whole thing seems.
I love Hulu and have expressed that love before. I watch “House” via Hulu, and while I wonder why there’s such an emphasis on clips from shows instead of the shows themselves, it’s a great experience. But I go to Hulu knowing what I’m getting, just as I go to YouTube knowing what I’m getting.
The AP’s foolish blunder in trying to enforce its view of fair use is getting more and more coverage in the blogosphere, including from notable voices such as Mark Glaser, Matthew Ingram (who makes a very important point) and Duncan Riley. It’s reached the point where it can only end badly for the AP, but here’s the worst case scenario.
Most media people dismiss the blogosphere as unsubstantiated crap, but like other “worlds,” the blogosphere contains some really, really sharp minds. Those minds are tapped daily by the people with money in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. These kinds of people seize financial opportunities when presented, and the clear opportunity here is for somebody to create a new world competitor to the walled garden that is the Associated Press.
Think about it. You have newspapers in Ohio organizing to swap stories. You have the newspaper consortium, brought together by the deal with Yahoo but talking amongst themselves about other opportunities. Given the huge sums of money that member media companies pay to participate in the “cooperative,” I’d be surprised if this subject hasn’t already come up in many places.
And what happens if somebody like Craig Newmark comes along and creates the aggregator for free?
Like I said earlier, the AP’s future has always been questionable, given the disruptive nature of the Web and what it does to middle men. But by its own foolish actions with The Drudge Retort, the AP has likely accelerated that by months, if not years.
Mike Orren is asking important questions about journalistic responsibility in an era when online search goes a long way toward determining a person’s identity and character. This is a new animal in the history of the press, and I think it bears discussion. Here’s the nut of it:
A media company with lots of Google Juice does a “man charged with” story. A search for that man’s name puts that story high in the search results. Later, the charges are dropped but the search results don’t change.
Orren, who cites personal examples in his post about the subject, thinks journalists might have some responsibility to update the original story in such a way that it assists the reader in determining the truth. That could be by adding a link to or otherwise re-editing the original text, things that could only be done with direct access to the database storage of the archived content produced by the media company.
This is new territory for journalism, because we’ve always been able to fall back on the notion that today’s content supersedes yesterday’s. You can get away with that as the “voice of record,” but nowadays, that position is increasingly being given to search engines and search technology.
It’s also interesting to me that these questions are coming from Mike, a guy who spends his life dealing with media at the hyperlocal level. It’s here — where your subjects are your neighbors — that the meaty issues of journalistic responsibility are most acute. For example, it’s one thing for the New York Times to “expose” a guy here in Grapevine, Texas, but it’s entirely another matter for the local paper to do the same thing.
This one is pretty hard to believe. The Online Journalism Review is shuttering after a decade, according to the “voice” of the OJR, Robert Niles. He’ll continue writing at his blog (SensibleTalk.com) and the mission of the OJR will continue through the Knight Digital Media Center.
Robert is an excellent writer with real insight into new media. I’m swapping RSS feeds from the OJR to his personal site.
With the exception of the essays entitled "TV News in a Postmodern World," all material created by Terry L. Heaton and included in this Weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
The Princeton Press announced this week that it would be offering hundreds of its textbooks via Amazon’s 
A couple of announcements over the past week by Google ought to have the attention of anybody in the online advertising business. Last week, the company unveiled “
