Mercury astronauts
Sam Whitmore and Mathew Ingram on Twitter
@samwhitmore: iPad: @mathewi criticizes the Mercury astronauts for not reaching the moon http://bit.ly/aP56Vz … it takes time, Mathew.
@mathewi: I’m not criticizing them for not reaching the moon, @samwhitmore — I’m saying their spaceship looks like an old Buick :-)
A too-quick-to-adapt Burger King
John P. Garrett’s Newspapers and the Burger King mentality. How would you like your news?
I believe the news business has been spinning mostly in circles not because the executives are slow to adapt to new technologies as many of the new media experts gripe. On the contrary, the news business has been too quick to adapt. Let me use Burger King as an illustration.
In the late 1970’s, Burger King introduced the “Have it your way” campaign. It was a smashing success. It told customers that if they didn’t want onions they don’t have to get onions. You could actually tell the person taking your order the way you wanted your burger as if you were at home preparing it yourself.
There were limits. You couldn’t tell them you wanted a specialty bun or spear pickles. They wanted you to know they would make the burger the way you wanted but still had profitability concerns. They still wanted to make money on their Whopper.
Today in the news business, we are like Burger King without the limits.
How do you want your news? Facebook? ok, email? ok, twitter? ok, without ads? ok, iPad? ok
A Burger King down the street from a burger joint overing free burgers with unlimited options
Judy Sims, in a comment on John P. Garrett’s Newspapers and the Burger King mentality. How would you like your news?
I think the flaw in your argument is that no one is offering free hamburgers with unlimited customization down the street from Burger King. If they were, BK would have to give away free hamburgers too and then figure out how to make money from delivering a different kind of value.
That’s what newspapers need to do. In fact, I believe that it is possible for online-only news media to be profitable. But they can’t be built off the traditional media cost structures.
Passengers on the Titanic
Howard Owens, in a comment on John P. Garrett’s Newspapers and the Burger King mentality. How would you like your news?
The fallacy is that journalism is expensive to produce. Good journalism is neither hard nor expensive. True, some stories can be expensive and hard and require experience and layers of editors, but the vast, vast majority of news is neither hard nor expensive.
Journalists intent on clutching to old models, like a Titanic passenger clinking to a deck railing, love to claim that only the old model can support the kind of journalism a democracy needs.
Reality is, however, it’s just not true. Especially now.
via Steve Buttry
A quarterback who just doesn’t get it
Dave Winer to Jay Rosen, 33 minutes into Rebooting the News #43
It’s like in football. … When the quarterback gets the ball, the quarterback always turns back and runs a few yards back before even thinking about passing the ball. And you think, “Why is the quarterback doing that? He’s giving up yardage. I mean, he’s running the wrong way.” Well he do it to find some little bit of room so he can see whats out there. So, in the new industry, they’re never willing to do that. They’re always standing right at the scrimmage line, not budging an inch. And of course what happens — they get tackled every goddamn time and they can never throw the ball.
A misnamed car
Andrew Spittle on Twitter, discussing how using the term “computer-assisted reporting,” instead of referring online tools, is silly.
CAR would be like calling a car an “engine assisted horse carriage”
William Durant and General Motors
Tommy Thomason’s Pew Report is good news and bad news for community journalism
William Durant didn’t like automobiles.
Durant, who was in the carriage business in the 1890s, thought cars were smelly and noisy, not to mention downright dangerous. But he realized that automobiles, as distasteful as he thought them to be, were the wave of the future. So he left his still-successful carriage company, one of the world’s largest, to join the new Buick company.
Ultimately, Durant went on to found General Motors.
The point? Durant’s times were a lot like ours. He was living at the edge of a paradigm shift-a whole new mode of transportation. Cars did not take over from carriages immediately, but within a decade, it was obvious that they would soon rule the road.
We live in a similar age, but the paradigm that’s shifting is communication, not transportation. One advantage that Durant had over today’s current industry-in-crisis — newspapers — is that the industrial landscape of his day was shifting more slowly. Metro newspapers have gone from boom to bust in a decade (though many in the know have been pointing to the danger signs for metros even before the advent of the Internet).
via Steve Buttry
An arthritic geriatric complaining about being an arthritic
Daniel Clowes in The New Yorker
“Look at this — a front-page story about how bad things are in the newspaper business! Talk about solipsistic! My god, it’s like listening to an old lady complain about arthritis!”
via John McQuaid
The most dominant, but least hip, operating system
Scott Rosenberg, in Technologizer‘s “The Future of Windows”
(It is actually comparing Microsoft Windows to newspapers, not the other way around, but I say it counts.)
Like the newspaper industry, Microsoft simply cannot trade in today’s significant but ultimately dwindling profits for bets on the future. That’s why you can bet the future will belong to someone else.
Boats for buring Marc Andreessen, quoted by Erick Schonfeld in Andreessen’s Advice To Old Media: “Burn The Boats”
Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown. Marc Andreessen has the same advice for old media companies: “Burn the boats.” Yesterday, Andreessen was in New York City and we met up. We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. In particular, he was talking about print media such as newspapers and magazines, and his longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will.
via Mimi Johnson
An aging virgin
Merlin Mann writing on Kung Fu Grippe about the thought process behind the decision to pull full-content RSS feeds from TheAtlantic.com during a redesign
This reeks of the same bush-league decision-making that hobbled Hulu, gets music fans sued, and keeps high-quality content locked in a tower like an aging virgin — too special to be manhandled by the riff-raff who are reluctant to pony up the lavish dowry that was the fashion fifty years earlier.
Update
The Atlantic’s James Fallows says the lack of content in the RSS feeds was a bug in the new CMS.
An aging, impotent beast
Mimi Johnson’s “Did it ever occur to you that even the most deathless love could wear out?”
The people who run newspapers and those who work for them are engaged in useless foreplay. They cling tightly, trying again and again to make the way they’ve always done it still work, but the passion is gone. They talk change: tearing down silos, building audience and monetizing content. But talk is their only capability. They eye non-profit status with government subsidies like it’s Viagra for print. They tussle through regrouping, “right-sizing,” and stripping down to “lean and mean.” They reorganize, then reorganize again, then grope their way back to same old position that no longer works. The wretched gyrations are hideously frustrating for the poor souls involved, and sadly fruitless. They give birth to nothing new. The newspaper business is an aging, impotent beast, bringing down a lot of good journalists who are tangled in its foundering arms.
Since I bought my Droid last November, I’ve used a bunch of different Twitter clients. I have yet to find one I’m really happy with. I know development is hard, and it seems whiny to complain publicly. My hope is that the developers will read this and incorporate some of my suggestions. Or someone else will build a new app that I will fall in love with. I’ve paid for Twitter clients before and I’ll pay for them again.
Let me start with the clients I’ve used, sort of in the order I used them, and my disappointments with each:
I was constantly running into bugs. At first it was random crashes that would lose all the information and settings I had added and changed. When I stopped using it, direct message threading was broken so that it would only show me the most recent thread of all my conversations. I want to tweet, not deal with bugs.
A simple app that I used briefly. I stopped using it because if I hadn’t checked my Twitter steam for a while (you know, like I was working or eating or sleeping), there was no easy way to jump to the top of the stream so it took forever to get to the top, especially since I had to wait several seconds for the app to update the stream every few scrolls.
The most recent version was a big update from the first. It doesn’t hold features ransom until you pay (Want bit.ly support? Buy the pro version!1), but it take at least two taps to open a link, or favorite something or whatever. Otherwise, better than the rest.
I asked on Aardvark about new Twitter clients and the developer of jibjib asked me to try it out. It includes no images, including avatars are icons suggesting what a button does. Couldn’t keep using it.
This is the newest one and the one I’m using now. Like Seesmic, it has the same too-much-tapping problem. Say I want to favorite something, which I do often for things I find funny or that have a link I want to check out later (since Pinboard saves these links for me). That take three taps: one to select the tweet and get the menu, one to select “more,” and a third to actually star it. It’s also missing an easy way to follow a conversation between users. Nor can I view anyone’s followers in the app and it doesn’t give me a way to get to Twitter.com to see that information.
So I want a better Twitter app. I want it to do these things:
That’s it. I don’t need widgets. I don’t need multi-account support. I don’t need geolocation (but it you’re going to include anything like that, please include geolocation as metadata instead of as a link2). I don’t need plug-ins.
So, who’s going to build this?
—
1 This is actually the case with Touiteur. And while I understand the developer’s need to get paid, withholding basic features in the free version isn’t the way to do it. ↩
2 Seesmic will figure out your location and this stick in into a tweet, either as an address or a link to a map, but not as metadata that doesn’t suck up those precious characters. ↩
