Daring Fireball Linked List: The Daily’s Pricing

One more thought on The Times’s pricing: What’s the thinking behind charging more to use their iPad app than their smartphone apps? If I’m paying for the content, what difference does it make how big my screen is? To me, the extra $5/month they’re charging for iPad app access indicates that they see iPad users as suckers to be fleeced.

Insane. They’re back-pocketing failure here. If the Times digital initiative fails, it’s because they can’t afford – or refuse – to admit that they’ll have to destroy their print production infrastructure to make digital succeed absolutely. It will suck. People will lose their jobs. But at some point, the change will happen, and either the Times will be at the heart of it, or they won’t. The problem with the latter is that they end up looking dumb and irrelevant, and all their best reporters will go to work for HuffPo. Worlds collide, indeed.

The Daily Maverick :: Internet kills the PR star: The all-new DIY churnalism detector

Now, eight decades or so later, we have churnalism.com. A non-commercial site funded by the Media Standards Trust, it allows users to paste in press releases and compare them with all the news in the UK’s national papers, as well as with stories on the BBC site and Sky News online. The word “churnalism” comes from Nick Davies’s book “Flat Earth News,” and means exactly what it appears to mean – an item in a newspaper published as journalism that is, in fact, a barely reworked press release.

Churnalism.com. Handy tool, that.

Aol To Journalists: You Be The Rock Star, We’ll Be Mark Chapman

Paul Carr with strategies for Aol to improve the bottom line.

• Only completely restructuring the entire company three times a week, instead of five.
• Ending the company’s popular “let’s burn all our money” Fridays.
• Increasing the cost of AOL dial-up and broadband to $10,000 a month “because those fucking idiots will buy anything.”
• …
• Making all potential editorial hires take a Turing test and rejecting any who pass.

There’s more. Worth a quick read.

AOL to Cut Up to 900 Jobs as It Integrates Huffington Post – Bloomberg

Says the man who brought us “The Aol Way:”

“AOL will invest more heavily in our in-house editorial team and transition away from a reliance on freelance journalists,” he said. “Journalists are the heart and soul of a media company.”

Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media, James Fallows:

Fifteen years ago, I published a book, Breaking the News, which argued that a relentless focus on scandal, spectacle, and the “game” of politics was driving citizens away from public affairs, making it harder for even the least cynical politicians to do an effective job, and at the same time steadily eroding our public ability to assess what is happening and decide how to respond. And this was in an era that in retrospect seems innocent.

Not that we need any more evidence that the nature of journalism has changed. But that, really, is the crux and Journalism has changed. It’s now lower-case-j journalism for the most part, and to find Journalism that matters anymore, the responsibility is on us to seek it out.

That’s not to say that what Gawker does is inherently bad. I read Gawker properties all the time. But the organization is representative of how habits have changed seemingly over night.

The Art of Immersion: Why Do We Tell Stories? | Epicenter | Wired.com, Frank Rose:

We stand now at the intersection of lure and blur. The future beckons, but we’re only partway through inventing it. We can see the outlines of a new art form, but its grammar is as tenuous and elusive as the grammar of cinema a century ago.

We know this much: people want to be immersed. They want to get involved in a story, to carve out a role for themselves, to make it their own. But how is the author supposed to accommodate them? What if the audience runs away with the story? And how do we handle the blur—not just between fiction and fact, but between author and audience, entertainment and advertising, story and game? A lot of smart people—in film, in television, in video games, in advertising, in technology, even in neuroscience—are trying to sort these questions out. The Art of Immersion is their story.

The REAL Death Of The Music Industry

No one seems to have tracked it back to the original source  nor noticed what happened to catch my eye straight away: This chart sucks.

This is a great piece on the decline of music sales. What’s interesting to me, as hard as it is for the “industry” to adjust to change, independent artists seem to be finding their way in this new world. Overhead is lower when you’re on your own, and you keep more ducats on what you sell, and you need fewer fans to justify your existence.

Seems like getting out from under big labels and embracing the power of the single might just be smart business.