The Best Recent Writing (and Ranting) About the Media Business

The media business, you may have heard somewhere, is in upheaval. Anyone with a stake in the production of content needs smart dissection of business models, careful parsing of data and, of course, pointed investigations that cut through the hype that always accompanies technological change. Too bad strong acts of journalism are few and far […]

Magazine Apps for iPads Need Work. Here Are Five Ways They Can Improve

I’ve spent a bit of time recently with the iPad, looking at some apps that were developed for magazine brands. It’s an experiment I assumed would be like of the those YouTube videos in which a cat, against all rules of nature, takes to nurturing a bunny or a baby squirrel: cute, compelling and somewhat dread-inducing, […]

Was Gawker’s Decision to Identify the ‘Racist’ Harvard Emailer Unethical? We Say Yes.

The notion of online privacy may be nothing more than a “fallacy,” as one New York judge recently opined, but anyone concerned with both the free-flow of information and with being fair to the subjects of news coverage will confront this question:  Do bloggers and journalists have a responsibility to protect the identities of the […]

A Fashion Magazine That’s Taking Digital Seriously. Seriously.

I’m a fashion person. So I don’t read Glamour Magazine for style inspiration. For that, I read Paris Vogue and Purple and V. But you know what? None of that matters, because a significant number of smart, capable women do read Glamour. And they’ve made it the most popular–and arguably the most influential–women’s magazine in […]

To Truncate or Not to Truncate: An RSS Experiment

Yesterday we made a decision to truncate the RSS feeds on AboveTheLaw for the next thirty days. RSS subscribers will get a headline and first paragraph, but will have to click to the site to get full stories. We’re far from the first to do it. In fact just recently Gawker joined many more mainstream […]

Media Companies Need to Kick Their Ad Dependency

I recently spoke at the annual conference of the Canadian Media Directors Council in Toronto. It was a good event as these things go, with an impressive speaker lineup (Bill Buxton, Microsoft’s principal researcher, was particularly fascinating), and the only reason I squeaked onto the agenda was that when they asked me if I’d do […]