Started my morning with a run. I got in a nice 5K before a series of meetings — fortunately, there were no meetings about meetings. My workday also ended with meetings about social media. In between, I gave a lecture on the “changing concepts of news.” I started around the muckrackers at McClure’s and worked up to the modern moment. In 2015, remember, Back to the Future II showed us flying robot reporters working for USA Today.
We talked a bit about the Oculus Rift work. I showed them the latest androids being developed in Japan:
Think about all of the changes that have taken place in journalism and storytelling in the last 40 years, I said. Imagine what it will look like toward the end of your career, in another 40 years.
That android, that so many of them thought to be odd or creepy today, will be positively old fashioned by then.
Things to read … because reading will never go out of style.
(We hope.)
How the news upstarts covered ISIS:
The rallying cry for those bemoaning the demise of newspapers was, “Without The New York Times, who would cover Iraq?” Well, quite a few places, it turns out.
As traditional media companies have scaled back their foreign bureaus, newer news organizations like Vice and BuzzFeed have expanded their mandate to fill the void. (Not included in this review is Global Post, the online startup that James Foley worked for, since it started with the express purpose of covering foreign news.) But can a bunch of relatively small upstarts cover the world’s hot spots? ISIS, one of the year’s biggest stories, is as good a test case as any to see how five have been doing it.
Here’s more pessimism for print advertising:
For newspapers, continued print advertising declines will mean more pressure on circulation (print subscribers and paywalls) or new revenue (digital marketing services, events) to make up the difference. Most likely, they won’t, and we’ll see more cuts.
If the rate of print ad decline does slow in 2015 (from 8.9 percent down to 6.2 percent down), that would be…semi-good news, I guess, after several years of drops in the high single digits? But there’s nothing here to predict a leveling off, much less a return to growth.
The ‘guiding principles’ of Quartz redesign
The Miami Herald’s new publisher is moving the paper a bit closer towards irrelevancy
VA ‘Oscar the Grouch’ training angers vets:
The beleaguered Department of Veterans Affairs depicted dissatisfied veterans as Oscar the Grouch in a recent internal training guide, and some vets and VA staffers said Tuesday that they feel trashed.
The cranky Sesame Street character who lives in a garbage can was used in reference to veterans who will attend town-hall events Wednesday in Philadelphia.
“There is no time or place to make light of the current crisis that the VA is in,” said Joe Davis, a national spokesman for the VFW. “And especially to insult the VA’s primary customer.”
These people will apparently not get it. And its a delightful little series of events to which we can all look forward.
The first college football game of the year was tonight. This guy was the referee:
I hadn’t realized that Boyd Crowder had taken on a side job:
Justified should be back around January. But football is here now. Hooray football.
