Content
The problem isn’t that magazines and newspapers are greedy or badly run, but that the demand for their content and the economics that fund it have shifted so far away from what they do. Marco Arment, visionairy software developer, concluding his blogpost The New-World Economy of a Modern Magazine
Music
There was a window in the 120 years of the record business where performers made loads and loads of money out of records. But it was a very small window — say, 15 years between 1975 and 1990. Mick Jagger, on the rise of illegal file sharing, in an interview with
Innovation
Masturbatory novelty is not a business strategy. Jeffrey Zeldman argues why publishers are doing the wrong thing, and use iPad as the new Flash
Old Media
We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine. Chief movie lobbyist Jack Valenti on
Free
The question these companies should be asking is, “How do we keep reporting and publishing good content?” Instead, though, they’re asking “How do we keep making enough money to support our existing management and advertising divisions?” John Gruber (Daring Fireball), Charging for Access to News Sites
Old Media
Magazines and newspapers were perfect businesses for a moment of time, but they wouldn’t have worked in 1784, and they’re not going to work very soon in the future either. Seth Godin, on Malcolm Gladwell, on Chris Anderson
Old Media
The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable