So Kodak, the company that invented amateur photography in the 19th century and invented digital photography in the 20th, is on the ropes. There are obvious lessons for newspapers and newsrooms. Here are a few of them.
Here's a New Year's resolution I'd like to see made, and kept, by all tech journalists:
Report first, then think, then write. Don't skip the first two steps, and don't get them out of order.
Computer, networking and mobile technology is changing all of human society. Journalism about tech is important. But tech journalism today is a vast wasteland of plagiarism, rumormongering, empty snark, fanboiism, trolling, unfounded assumptions and whole-cloth invention.
Innovation can be messy. In fact, I'd go so far as to say innovation should be messy, if you want real progress.
In a piece of shallow pageview-trolling that's typical of tech "journalism," PC magazine is likening Google Chrome to Internet Explorer 6 (Satan's Web browser) because it's doing things other browsers can not, as yet, do.
There's a small, private get-together under way in Phoenix this weekend called #NewsFoo that is catching some flak on Twitter as being exclusionary and elitist. Same thing happened last year, and I think also the year before. It's not public. It's not transparent. It didn't advertise and accept applications.
If you care about the "future of news" debate, take a few minutes to read Clay Shirky's response to Dean Starkman's essay in the Columbia Journalism Review, which was titled "Confidence Game."
What strikes me most about the reactionary responses of the people Jay Rosen calls "the printies" is how often the acts of observation and analysis are identified and attacked as advocacy.
I've had a Kindle Fire for just a few hours, so I won't pretend to write a definitive hardware review, but here are some observations:
