Tag: carriages

Metaphors: horse carriages and a really dumb quarterback

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”

Metaphors: More General Motors

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