This strikes me as the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard out of the news industry. Protect a product on the decline by making a product on the rise intentionally worse?
Mmmmkay.
Why not just shut your website down entirely so that the only way to get Inquirer content is by paying for a paper to be produced and delivered to you?
Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.
But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding – crime, traffic, weather – or we turn off the news altogether.
Cameron’s Colosseo letterpress poster is now available: The only question is, black or white? The black is oh so tempting!
Jon Stewart Skewers Media’s Obsession with Chat Roulette: Funniest Wii Craps reference ever, as well. It’s really interesting to me that Chat Roulette is getting this much “attention” when TinyChat has been around so much longer, essentially does the same thing and more, and is much more useful to the average person. Just goes to show how viral public sex acts can be.
The 2005 email that spawned Picnik, Google’s latest buy. If you’re thinking about launching a startup, you should study this e-mail carefully. It’s a perfect example of exactly how a crazy little thought becomes a big idea, and even on its own, it’s better than most “official company business plans” people present to VCs. I gave a talk at Webstock in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago about creating a startup and I wish I had this to dissect at the time. Really good stuff.
I actually really like how clubby it is. Unfortunately it means I won’t be commenting on any Tumblrs since I don’t officially “follow” anyone besides via RSS, but that’s probably ok. Maybe the answer to the world’s wide-open commenting problem is something like this.
I was a guest on Dan Benjamin’s new weekly radio show last week, along with Merlin Mann, Christina Warren, Adam Keys, and Dave Nanian. Subjects discussed include Newsvine, keeping your own identity after becoming part of a big company, and the RADICAL concept of only publishing stuff to your readers and followers that is actually true.
Given that pre-compiling CSS is an official “best practice” these days, why not use that compile step to extend CSS in powerful ways? LESS lets you use variables, nested rules, and other niceties at author-time to clean up your rules and keep everything tidy. I believe The Wolf made something like this a few years ago, but I haven’t heard about it since.
Great article on the ins and outs of three dimensional imagery. Still doesn’t change my opinion that well-shot conventional cinematography is more impressive than the novelty that is Avatar.
This is one of the most useful articles I’ve read in a long time. As we work on focusing, strengthening, and simplifying Newsvine, the concepts discussed by Lukas ring true. “Saying no” has never been a strong suit of mine. It’s very helpful to remember how important of a quality it is. (via fullstopinteractive)
Newly released video of the space shuttle Challenger disaster: It was 24 years ago, I was in 5th grade, but I remember it like it was yesterday. School was stopped immediately and they wheeled out televisions in every classroom for us to watch the news footage. It’s great that this video has been released, but holy crap, how do you tuck something that away for two decades???
New ways of searching are almost never as useful as old ways of searching. Spezify is pretty awesome though. It’s a visually interesting, never-ending, horizontally and vertically scrollable, topic explorer. I don’t think I’d use it for digging deep on anything, but to get a quick visually rich sampling of a topic, it’s quite fun (via tiff, a long time ago actually, over email).
Reminds me of my favorite logo design advice: “Never waste a stroke”. (via gruber)
(345)
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And this is hardly the first time this silly sort of decision has been made. It’s a ‘99 decision. But I still have clients who’d rather have all their content text be a .jpg of some text so that they can guarantee everyone will see that cool font they like.
Sigh.
This decision seems to be made by people not understanding both their product or audience.
Both products (paper and online) should be complimenting one another, not in direct competition. There are many reasons the physical paper is highly relevant: there’s its fantastic portability; the tangible nature of turning the pages; the experience of reading the top news stories and flipping it over to catch up with the sport on the back over a coffee or on the train. These are qualities that are not necessarily replicated well online.
Online obviously has the huge advantage of the live quality to its content, the fantastic contribution of readers comments and thoughts as well as the convenience of RSS feeds enabling you to glimpse the headlines as they evolve over the day.
This decision seems to imply that there are simply two separate consumers of their content: you are either an old timer that reads the paper and has no time for a computer, and those that only read their news online. Very perplexing indeed.
Its simply terrible decision and one I’m sure will be reverted back in due course when they realise what a faux pas it is.
[...] online publishing of many of their stories until their printed newspaper is already distributed. Mike Davidson: “This strikes me as dumbest idea I’ve ever heard out of the news industry. Protect a [...]
Agreed, Miles.
I can just imagine what it’s like to work in the web side at that paper.
This just in, ________ (insert big box store here) will not sell anymore paper products until you first buy a pen or a pencil (sorry markers don’t count).
Doug, that would be a good comparison if people actually paid for online news. But they don’t. Most people are too selfish to even sign up for a free account to read full stories, leaving newspapers with few ways to accurately prove their readership levels to advertisers.
Now, I agree that their decision isn’t a smart move when people can get their news from a million other places online, but can you really blame them for trying? Someone has to try something.
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Paul, I’m all for experimenting, but this is kind of like “experimenting” with diesel gas in your non-diesel car. You already know it’s not going to work! :)
Here’s what’s especially confounding to me about this: In order to prove, or even posit, that this is a good idea, you’d have to poll people with the following questions –
1. “Why aren’t you paying for our paper?” (Let’s assume the answer is “because I just read everything online” because that’s the only answer that would even cause an idea like this to be floated)
2. “Would you start paying for the paper again if __% of the stories weren’t available online until the paper version came out?”
I just can’t imagine anyone saying yes to the second question. If people have decided to remove newspapers from their daily routines, they are mostly likely removed for good. Sure you might get the very rare edge case who *thinks* their answer to that question is yes, but when it comes to opening their wallet, is it really? And even if it is, it is worth crippling your entire newsroom’s workflow for it?
I’ll bet the editor of the Inquirer $100 that this research has either not been done or that the results of it are being severely misinterpreted.
@paul, I do pay for an internet connection and computer though, which to me is the pen or pencil (it allows me to write), where the paper is the CMS/Blog software/etc that allows me to publish.
Taking a step back without thinking about how it is going to vault you forward, often results in last place and not two steps forward.
Also this quote
“Most people are too selfish to even sign up for a free account to read full stories”
is a rather myopic look at what is actually happening. Perhaps they aren’t the selfish ones, you are. You have assumed that the value add by signing up, will entice them to do so.
Ehh, sounds like suicide on their part.
I guess on the bright side, their newspaper website still looks 100 times better than the one for my town (www.stltoday.com) – even if the news is going to be old(er) now.
I’ll bet the local news channel websites will pounce on the opportunity to spike their traffic.
Sounds like they’re trying to rally against the “I want it free and I want it now” mantra. Good luck with that. I’m completely making this up, but it seems like people who read the paper and people who read news online are almost completely different audiences. I never touch the paper, and my girlfriend reads it every morning. Just give us the news as quick as you can in both formats – I’ll choose the one that works for me. If not, I can easily head to Google News. Granted they’re between a rock and a hard place financially, but this is death on a stick.
“Updated continuously by citizens like you, Newsvine is an instant reflection of what the world is talking about at any given moment.”
Top story on Newsvine right now? Some women wants the right to massage horses!! I’ll stick with actual news people who may well make silly decisions but at least they go out and get actual news that might relevant rather than the “vote” it up crowd who, as illustrated, don’t have a damn clue!
I work for a newspaper and we’ve made a dramatic shift to publishing stories on our website as soon as we have them rather than on our print news cycle. Granted the move should have been made 8 years ago, but what do you expect from execs who were wet nursed in Pangaea?
We do hold some stories we feel are exclusive for competitive reasons.
Emma: Newsvine is not a replacement for your local news organization. It’s a different filter on the news of the world.
The only thing this will accomplish is further alienate people who trust the Inquirer — now, since they can’t get their news online in a time-sensitive way, they’ll stop using Philly.com at all, which will further erode the value of the news reporting (and the income the online venue brings in).
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
[...] online publishing of many of their stories until their printed newspaper is already distributed. Mike Davidson: This strikes me as dumbest idea I’ve ever heard out of the news industry. Protect a product on [...]