Another Nail in the RSS Coffin

The default Paper.li view (click to enlarge)

When I first saw the details on the Flipboard iPad app (via Rexblog, I believe), I figured my days of using NetNewsWire on a daily basis were numbered. By creating a newspaper out of the Twitter users you follow, Flipboard offers an incredibly convenient way of reading what [...]

We've Got Algorithms. Who Needs Editors?

In an article published last weekend on Mashable, Sarah Kessler asked the question, “Can Robots Run the News?” It’s an important question not just for journalists, but for anyone who creates or curates content on the Web.

The examples Kessler cites span the range of content creation, from automatically generated sports news to the use of [...]

Is B2B Ready for Corporate Journalism?

Over the weekend, one of my blog posts from several months ago provoked a comment that was simply too good to let pass unnoticed. It spelled out the feelings of many journalists when faced with the prospect of going over to the dark side, as David Meerman Scott has put it, by writing directly for [...]

Social Media and the Decline of Editing

Earlier this month, after writing his final column for Inc. magazine, Joel Spolsky blogged about his experience in the magazine world. His feelings, clearly, were mixed:

“Writing for Inc. was an enormous honor, but it was very different than writing on my own website. Every article I submitted was extensively rewritten in the [...]

The Shift to New Media Cannot Be Gradual

CJR: Huge culture gap between print and online

In the B2B publisher’s dream world, the transition to online media would come as a natural evolution from print. The vocabulary, the ethos, the culture, the methods would all be organic extensions of print.

Reality, of course, is brutally different.

The shift to online media is not an extrapolation [...]

Gimmicks and the Decline of Print

In an article published this week on Folio:‘s Web site, Jill Ambroz reviews a panoply of print “innovations” that, she writes, “are breathing fresh air into a mature industry that is battling its own digital counterparts for survival.” It’s hard to tell how seriously she takes these innovations, especially as she twice refers to them [...]

Google to Rein In Content Farms?

Matt Cutts: Raising the Bar

Is Google poised to slow the growing domination of its search results by content farms like Demand Media and Associated Content? At the end of last Saturday’s episode of the podcast This Week in Google, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, suggested that it would: “If your business [...]