In the past, I’ve argued that serious journalism isn’t becoming less profitable, so much as being exposed as having never profitable in the first place. In doing so, I’ve leaned on Clay Shirky who argued the same in 2009: Journalism written for that fraction of the population that follows the news closely has always been …
One critical role for journalism is to challenge readers’ assumptions about how the world works, as well as to expose them to new values different than their own. At least sometimes. Other times, readers legitimately simply want to get information, but what information counts as relevant will depend on one’s assumptions. That’s the point I …
Back in early 2010, shortly after launching this blog, I put pen to paper on some of the core ideas guiding my views on the future of news. Here’s one of them that I still believe is crucial and often ignored: 1) When I talk about how we will finance news/journalism I’m interested in only …
Another day, another misguided view on intellectual property. Via Tim Lee at Ars Technica, here’s a quote from a representative from Ron+Rand Paul’s Campaign for Liberty: “We think the public domain is a terrific part of the Internet,” he told us. Rather, he said, the group was worried that “Internet collectivists” would use the phrase …
One of the key things to understand in the debate over the future of journalism is that people who paid to write will tend to favor systems that continue to pay a lot of people to write. And that may or may not be best for the public. This was front and center in my …
There’s no such thing as information overload; only filter failure. That’s the wonderful Clay Shirky maxim. Now we can add to that the maxim: There’s no such thing as a Misinformation problem; only filter failure and attribute it to ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Ok, he didn’t quite say that. But it was close. This is …
Via Reihan Salam, here’s a bit from Greg Mankiw: one reason that people differ in their incomes is that some people care more about having a high income than others… Bryan [Caplan] goes on to suggest that to the extent this is true, it weakens the case for income redistribution. He is absolutely right. Most …
Are algorithms the future of news writing? Wired had an interesting article on that topic last week, focusing on a company called Narrative Science that is already doing it. Here’s the excerpt Wired provides from a Narrative Science story: Friona fell 10-8 to Boys Ranch in five innings on Monday at Friona despite racking up …
One of the coolest paper abstracts I’ve read, via MR, presented without comment: Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a …
It’s been just a couple months since the media world debated whether Forbes writer Kashmir Hill went overboard in her curation of an NYT story on Target’s predictive analytics. Basically, Hill slapped a way better headline on the piece, pulled in a bunch of quotes, added some of her own prose, and got a ton …