"If the only tool you have is a hammer," said psychologist Abraham Maslow, "you tend to see every problem as a nail." I thought about that as I examined a couple of recently launched websites: The Industry Standard and NotchUp, both of which bear the "beta" label acknowledging their concepts are only partially baked.
I was looking over Tim McGuire's syllabus for a class he's teaching at Arizona State, Business and Future of Journalism, and one paragraph really caught my eye:
The Chicago Tribune has shut down commenting on a range of political stories, and public editor Timothy McNulty tries to explain why. But the Tribune got it wrong from the start by allowing auto-published comments without even the basic step of authenticating the user's email address. This irresponsibility led to the an outcome that was utterly predictable.
McNulty's defense of the shutdown, however, doesn't stand up. For example:
I'll leave it to others to comment on the potential impact on the newspaper industry of the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo takeover.
I'm interested in how Microsoft may be faced with a choice: Change who you are in a very fundamental way, or destroy both Yahoo and yourself in the process.
That is the very choice facing newspapers today, and we might learn something by considering how this takeover might play out.
In an awesomely detailed post, the editor of Schamper, the student newspaper at the University of Gent (Belgium) describes how he -- a philosophy major -- built a Web-centric content management system that outputs to Adobe InDesign for print, all based on the open-source Drupal CMS framework. How integrated is it? Well, when an editor opens a story, it's locked so others can't modify it. When it's stored, the XML output is updated and InDesign refreshes the layout. And oh, by the way, there's also a public-facing website.
Mark Luckie's post What the journalism industry can learn from porn is getting some linkage for its observations that purveyors of pornography have done a much better jobs than purveyors of journalism when it comes to taking advantage of new media. True enough, but there are other lessons I think that deserve some attention.
There are two kinds of people in this world. There are those who implement Internet filtering. And there are those who hate Internet filtering. Sam Zell's memo putting an end to filtering at the Tribune Company is getting cheers from the victim side of that line. On2 recalls:
