joshuago’s journalism Bookmarks

Content creation is for suckers. The real money and power have always been in aggregation. The recent struggles of the previously unassailable giants can be attributed to diminished effectiveness of old methods of aggregation.

The abundance of printed material replaced the natural, visceral human oral psychodynamics with those of literate and written ones. Twitter and Facebook bring us back to that unpolished conversational flow.

Reading news online feels like flying Economy. Loud distracting banners, cheap stock picture material, sloppy typography, a lot of useless comment noise, machine generated reading tips, no human service, and a claustrophobic information design make the reading experience a torture.

How a newspaper company got in the business of for-profit higher education and took heat for exploiting the poor. Also, how it benefited from government policy and dealt with internal culture clashes.

Provoke emotional reactions instead of informing. Take with a grain of salt, but remember that traffic means ads, ads mean money, and money is like life-giving blood to any business.

The Post on its move to a new web-based CMS, Methode. Apparently cost them $7 million, but at least it's used by a bunch other big-name papers such as the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and the Boston Globe.

Those of us looking to produce high quality content for the web should consider the possibility that our first problem is that we’re calling it content. This commoditizes it and sends the message that quality doesn't matter.

A prediction piece, but one with a couple of timeless and noteworthy gems. When journalists are called on to redirect the corporate culture of an organization, sometimes it works in a small way, but usually it doesn't; and almost never on a vast scale.

Not paying is always simple.

Former design director of the NY Times says it's still too early to tell whether the new paywall will work, but also says that The Times spent too much time and effort on it that could have gone to other innovation.