Today's New York Times examines how Fox News and MSNBC seem to be covering two separate universes. How did we come to this? The answer turns out to be fairly simple: Do the math.
Economists have a common model that explains it all. Like all models, it's an oversimplification, but it's easy to follow. Instead of politics, let's think about ice cream stands and a beach.
Rube Yelvington died peacefully this morning in a Louisville hospital.
Rube was my dad. He also was a newspaper reporter, photographer, editor and publisher. At various times in his life he was a soldier, a delivery truck driver, a railroad man, a tour company operator, the proprietor of a country-western music hall, a mayor of a small town and a community organizer. I think he was a great man.
Packt, a publishing company that specializes in books about computer programming, has begun selling electronic versions of its books that you can download before the writing is even finished. They call the program RAW -- for "Read As we Write." You get to download chapters as they are posted, even before the final publication edits.
This week I'm in Jacksonville, Fla., where a team (right) is hard at work rebuilding Jacksonville.com on our new Drupal-based site management system. There are others up in Augusta and other locations, working as part of a larger virtual team, but even with instant messaging and regular conference calls there's no substitute for shoving a bunch of folks into one room with a sack full of junk food and not letting them out.
Forbes reports that the New York Times is planning to fold the IHT.com website into the Times' main website, perhaps the first step in bringing to an end a venerable brand in the community of American expatriates in Europe.
It seems inevitable. The International Herald Tribune, originally the European edition of the New York Herald, once met a great need. For the expat American in Paris, it was like a drink of cool water to a traveler wandering in the desert.
Paul Fahri is right in so many details as he recounts how he deck is stacked against America's newspapers, yet so wrong in concluding that journalism doesn't share the blame. Journalism should share the blame, and journalists are not powerless.
He seems to have a notion that there is some sort of objective standard of quality that has been maintained during the long and painful descent of newspapers from the position they once held at the center of American life.
Newspapers, which replaced the town crier with what became to be known as print journalism, are slowly awakening to a second function that's ideally performed on the Web: the town square. But there's a third role that's being overlooked, and that's the role of community memory.I've begun using that term lately in discussions of how we need to expand our journalistic processes. We need to move away from exclusive reliance on episodic storytelling and toward the creation of "living resources" that are updated whenever they need to be.
I'm back in the USA, somewhat the worse for wear. After dodging the infamous "Delhi belly" for nearly two weeks, it hit me just as we boarded Delta 17 for New York and I've been in a stupor ever since.
Worse yet, when I went to the doctor Saturday, Visa had blocked my credit card because I'd used it once at a Mumbai hotel, and of course I had no American money. Half an hour on the phone to Commerce Bank (mostly listening to on-hold messages) fixed that, but I was not happy to be standing there with a 102+ fever.
On our first day in India, we overslept, ate Paper Dosa Masala, got caught in the monsoon, missed going to Elephanta Island, found the Gateway of India on foot, fell victim to the ear wax scam, danced in a Ganesh festival parade and covered with red dye powder and white confetti, and had my Nokia phone knocked out of commission by a Bluetooth virus.
Tomorrow we head back to Mumbai's thoroughly awful airport to fly to Goa, a former Portuguese foothold down the west coast.
I'm about to go off the grid -- mostly -- for a couple of weeks. Friday morning I'm pulling Paige, my 15-year-old daughter, out of school and heading for the airport, where we'll board a flight to Atlanta. From there it's on to New York, then a long flight to Mumbai, India, where we'll arrive after 10 p.m. Saturday.By Monday we'll be in Goa, the old Portuguese settlement on the western coast, where I'm speaking at a publisher and CEO conclave organized by Ifra. After the congress we'll fly back to Mumbai, then take an overnight train to New Delhi, where we'll stay five days.
