The inevitable collision of journalism and everything else

Journalistic entities are moving towards becoming product companies, offering products that turn content into marketing. As a side effect, this creates businesses that follow Jack White’s theory of control: vertically integrated, creating content that markets a product that markets the content that markets the product all over again.

Like USA Today selling its data, POLITICO making a bookstore, my local public radio station selling membership or TechCrunch launching Disrupt. Publishers that successfully turn their content into brand building and marketing for a product are the ones that are surviving.

Sean Blanda — The inevitable collision of journalism and everything else

News sites as “angry fruit salad on meth”

I made the mistake of going to a website today. It’s understandable, of course — everybody does it, from time to time — and I’m sure I’ll forgive myself, eventually.

I don’t mean just any website, of course, I mean a publication. A place where a business publishes interesting things that I like to read.

I couldn’t hit the Reader button in Safari fast enough. In fact, I couldn’t hit it at all, so stunned was I by the flickering colorful circus the page presented. It was like angry fruit salad on meth.

Brent Simmons — The Pummeling Pages (via Andrew)

Status

Status

Idea: make it easy for readers to submit their comment as a guest piece based on its length (e.g. suggestion interface after it passes). Like YouTube offers video responses, dedicated community members should be able to work their way into more empowered publishing positions.

Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?

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As someone with Franzendentalist roots and Epiphinator tendencies, who consumes too many hours of social media, I keep sensing some serious hurt feelings from the older-media side — “Why would you love that thing instead of me?” They act like my wife would if I brought home a RealDoll. But it’s not like that. I don’t think people love Twitter or Facebook in the same way they might love Parks and Recreation or Twilight. Rather, we like the beer and tolerate the bottle. And even if we have those other browser tabs open, we’re still hungry for endings.

Paul Ford — Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?

Hyperlocal Post-Mortem: Lessons Learned From InJersey

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Hyperlocal Post-Mortem: Lessons Learned From InJersey. Fantastic pragmatic takeaways from Ted Mann. Highlights: local advertisers don’t like self-serve, build your site cheaply, and make it ridiculously easy for contributors to publish (e.g. don’t have them email posts to editors, and then require the editor to copy/paste, edit, and then publish).