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 [...]

Hire Your Future Competitor

On his excellent B2B Blog last Friday, Chris Koch reflected on Forrester’s recent decision to make all its analysts move their blogs into Forrester’s web site.

Forrester claims the move was made to protect its intellectual property. Koch’s view, though, is that Forrester’s motivation is to do the very thing it urges clients not to do: [...]

Ethics: Is Transparency All We Need?

For most practitioners of new-media journalism, the key to ethics is transparency. So long as you disclose all your biases and interests in what you write about, you’re OK. The rest of the traditional guidelines in which journalists have been trained are up for discussion, it seems. The latest and, to me, most mind-boggling example [...]

Damnation and Creation: Is Demand Media Devaluing Content?

Demand Media is evil. Or so Folio: magazine general manager Tony Silber implied yesterday in a blog post entitled “Demand Media Can Go to Hell.”

Silber’s beef with the so-called content farm is like that of many others from traditional publishing:  to pay freelance writers a paltry 3 cents a word, on average, is to  “demean [...]

Should B2B Get Excited about the Digital Magazine Consortium?

For B2B publishers, how big a deal is the recently announced digital magazine consortium?  Does the participation of industry titans Condé Nast, Time Inc., Hearst, Meredith, and News Corp., mean our magazines will all soon be read on cool e-reader tablets? Or is it just more hot air?

For me, the answers to these questions came [...]

B2B Blog Posts of the Week: The Turkey in the Room

Thanksgiving week in the States is never very productive for the B2B work world, and that appears equally true for B2B bloggers. While some tried to ignore the elephantine turkey in the room, others attempted, mostly in vain, to make the holiday pertinent to their usual subject matter. By mid-week, it was clear that we [...]

Earth to Esquire: Get Real

Last year it was an e-ink electronic display on the cover; this year, it’s 3D special effects—if you have a webcam handy, anyway.

As I learned this morning from Mashable, Esquire magazine’s December issue will feature something called augmented reality (AR). The way it works, as I understand it, is that you can hold the cover [...]