Big Think Blog

It’s an exciting time to work in media, and each day, journalism takes on more and different interesting new forms. At the Content Content Blog, Cath Elliott advises aspiring journalists: act like journalists; practice makes perfect; persistence pays. But does that mean anyone can, ahem, hack it? Not a chance. New Yorker editor David Remnick says luck and hard work are incredibly important but talent remains paramount. (And a little schmoozing never hurts either.) Above all, writers need to “be obsessed” with their work. And that’s where bloggers have an edge (our note).

The Huffington Post is suggesting a potential remedy for wounds inflicted by the New Yorker’s recent Obama cover. In response to the racially-charged cartoon of a Muslim Barack Obama and a gun-toting Michelle Obama, Harvey Wasserman suggests the New Yorker follow up with a “McBush” depiction.

To parry, cartoonist Barry Blitz defends his portrayal as an important antidote to Obama rumors. “I think the idea that the Obamas are branded as unpatriotic, let alone as terrorists, in certain sectors, is preposterous. It seemed to me that depicting the concept would show it as the fear-mongering ridiculousness that it is,” says Blitz. Wasserman’s response to that, correctly, is well, okay, but equal attention should be devoted to both candidates’ ridiculousness.

When interviewed at Big Think, New Yorker editor David Remnick said his magazine would, in fact, endorse a candidate for the 2008 election. Interesting. I wonder who it will be.

Timothy Egan reminds us of the famous Thomas Jefferson line in his Outposts blog today: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” But Egan is quick to reports both sides of the story: “Jefferson also said the only reliable truths in newspapers were the advertisements, and that he was happiest when not reading the papers.”

It’s no secret that newspapers are in deep trouble. Almost 1,000 jobs were eliminated in the American newspaper industry this week. Yet, newspaper Web sites attracted more than 66 million unique visitors in the first quarter of 2008 — a record, and a 12 percent increase over a year ago, according to a Nielsen Online analysis. And forty percent of all Internet users visit a newspaper site, reports Egan.

The problem is, nobody has figured out how to monetize news on the Web. Someone who is coming close is blog queen Arianna Huffington. Here she explains how to fix the newspaper business model.

To learn more about the people who use Big Think, we have partnered with a research firm called Federated Media, which has designed a special Big Think survey.

We hope this relationship with Federated will accomplish two things: help drive more appropriate advertising–to bring you the kinds of products and services that you like most. And, provide Big Think with valuable information about your interests, which will help us build content that is right for you.

So when you have a free moment, take the quick and easy Big Think survey. We’ll be happy to share the results with you when we have them. And thanks for continuing to participate in the conversation.

http://external.fmpub.net/take/209/

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who named his daughter after a heroine in an Ayn Rand novel, admits that the benefits of online collaboration through features like wikis can be unsexy. Take his anecdote about the two IBM executives who spent almost a year working on the same exact project before they met through a wiki and flagged the redundancy.

Did the discovery make the two researchers nauseous? Probably. But did it save IBM loads of money? Definitely!

When it was discovered last week that news of Tim Russert’s death was broken on Wikipedia by a low-level NBC staffer, Gawker announced that posting news on the Sum of All Human Knowledge basically ensures that nobody will notice. But the speed with which the Internet can disseminate news has made Gawker possible, as well as changed the game for traditional media companies, like the one Mr. Russert worked for.

The question now is, will old media companies like NBC shift almost entirely to the Web, or will newer, better, faster, smarter companies emerge to challenge the old Liviathons and change the face of media?

Clue: It’s already happening. Click below.

http://www.bigthink.com/science-technology/the-internet/10701

The future of social networking sites is uncertain, even to some of the biggest names in Web 2.0. Big Think recently interviewed Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia and Wikia, who says that Facebook and MySpace may not yet have built sound business models. Wales asks whether social networking sites are sustainable in general: If you’re always following your friends to the newest site, what happens to the avatar you left on Friendster or Orkut?



And yesterday, we learned that LinkedIn, which may not be just-another-social-networking-site, has raised another $53 million in investment capital. That brings LinkedIn’s current valuation up to a whopping $1 billion (although just $14 billion shy from Facebook’s appraisal in 2007). Are these investors right — are business executives and contact-minded individuals may be yearning for a space to connect?

Kevin Rose, founder and chief architect of Digg.com, makes his predictions about the internet. Although social networking is generally “tired,” he is following a few exciting sites:

The Newspaper Association of America’s Digital Edge blog announces new Nielsen ratings that highlight the shifting sands of news distribution.

The site run by the elusive Matt Drudge, has the highest number of clicks per person, since viewers go there multiple times per day. But Yahoo! News leads the pack in terms of unique visitors, followed by the MSNBC Digital Network.

After Drudge’s 20 “sessions per person,” comes Daily Kos is second at 9.6, and Fox News Digital Network is now third at 8.7.

These numbers prove what everyone has suspected for a long time, that we are increasingly turning away from print and towards the Web to get our news. However, 10 of the top 30 sources in the Nielsen list are newspapers, including washingtonpost.com, Hearst Newspapers Digital, and Nytimes.com. Newspaper Web sites attracted a record number of clicks–more than 69.4 million unique visitors in May. That’s 41.7 percent of all Internet users.

What is clear is that Drudge and Daily Kos aside, we like visiting the websites of large media companies, which we trust across platform. And without those large media companies reporting the news, Drudge would have no visitors at all. At the core, he is just a savvy aggregator.

I suffer from baldness. Lately, during visits to my Facebook page, I noticed that there was a small ad in the lower left corner advertising hair replacement services. How does the company selling these services know to advertise directly to me, and probably other bald people as well?

It turns out that the visual-shopping search engine Like.com, in partnership with Facebook, scours users’ profile photos to determine what they might like, according to TechCrunch. They’re called contextual ads and they match images with products and services. “Effective and creepy,” says TechCrunch.

Is the Web turning into Big Brother? Is privacy over? Here’s what Oxford professor and technology expert Jonathan Zittrain has to say about the future of the Internet, and specifically, issues of privacy on the Web.

One of the many casualties of the big media consolidation of newspapers and television has been the downsizing and closing of foreign news bureaus. Formerly, stories out of far flung regions of world were covered by local and foreign (American) correspondents based out of hubs like Nairobi, Islamabad and Singapore. Through networks of interpreters and fixers, they filed stories big and small and picked up a few Pulitzers along the way. This was the 80s. Then came the likes of Time Warner and News Corporation which to cut costs began shuttering bureaus and relying more on stringers and freelancers who cost peanuts compared to fully-staffed and secured bureaus. By 2004, the share of front-page newspaper space reserved for international reporting had fallen to 14% from 27% in 1977.
Internet-based coverage has filled in some voids but citizen journalism has not quite developed to cover tribal skirmishes in Saharan Africa the way it has to cover car accidents in Peoria.


The international story of the moment is and will continue to be the war on terror. We have good Iraq coverage for obvious reasons, but, as for other hot zones, they are relatively quiet. The US has roughly 8,000 troops in Afghanistan, yet the country hardly makes headlines except for reporting coalition military deaths. Non-terrorism or crisis-related international news is even less likely to make it to the networks. Chances are if there is a bank heist in Dili or a dam that burst in the Pamirs, we are not going to hear about it unless we delve deeply into wire services like the Associated Press , or frequent more backchannel sources like Pajhwok Afghan News.


Alan Weisman, author of the World Without Us and man in the field extraordinaire, has been charting the demise of foreign coverage over the decades. He argues that the leading internet sources like Yahoo and Google, which currently only re-report wire or major newspaper stories, need to pony up and post actual correspondents in the field.

George Ritzer coined the term “McDonaldization” in 1995 to describe the stranglehold that the fast food chain had on the American consumer’s mindset (and was beginning to have on the mindset of every consumer across the world). At the time, McDonald’s was dominating the fast food market. However, it rarely led the industry in terms of innovative food offerings. Lately, it’s nothing but more of the same old with McDonald’s. The company added a “Southern Style Chicken Sandwich” to its fast food menu this month that bears a strong resemblance to Chick-fil-A’s staple sandwich.


Ritzer explained that McDonald’s rose to supremacy because it managed to epitomize the Enlightenment notion of rationality. Back in the 1940s, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argued that the rationality put forth by the Enlightenment begot a homogenized culture industry in which everything was indistinguishable from all of its near relatives. The recent culinary plagiarism enacted by McDonald’s is just another example of how the corporation has managed to make a fast food world stuffed with homogeneity. The future of food looks grim based on this trajectory; it will consist of only a few choice products that have passed McDonald’s standards of exclusion. People will have to buy whatever McDonald’s sells even if they do not necessarily want to buy it, even if there isn’t any real substantive reason to be selling it. Is a chicken sandwich really that good? McDonald’s planned a promotion effort on May 15 to test out its “new” chicken sandwich. The company found that the new ’wich didn’t do as well as expected, the New York Times reported. Chairman of McCann Erickson New York Nina DiSesa weighs in on the idea of corporate manipulation and whether or not anyone can sell anything to anyone else that that person does not want to purchase.