"If called, I will certainly serve. But if not called, I will probably serve anyway."
Tech Crunch interviews Marc Andreessen, who more or less brought the web to the masses when he started Netscape, the first serious web browser (more recently he’s been some of the money and brains behind Ning):
[Andreesen] believes that all the talk once again from big media companies about erecting paywalls or somehow charging for news, articles and video online is shortsighted at best. He comes back to the simple fact that the open Web is where the users are. Talking about paywalls and paid apps is like saying, “We know where the market is and we are not going to go there.” Print newspapers and magazines will never get there, he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations. Yes, there are still a lot of people and money in those boats—billions of dollars in revenue in some cases. “At risk is 80% of revenues and headcount,” Andreessen acknowledges, “but shift happens.” You’d have to be crazy to burn the boats. Crazy like Cortes.
From the NYTimes:
For more than a decade, media companies have hoped for a day when they could either control access to their products online or at least put a price on them that a mass market would bear. But that day has never come. What has changed is the level of threat they face, given the worst advertising downturn in memory.
Count me as one of skeptical ones when it comes to large-scale charging of readers.
Changes at PBS’s News Hour:
Until recently, the employees who worked on the Web site of “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” on PBS were based in a building a brisk five-minute walk through city traffic from their on-air colleagues. The Web and television staffs interacted only at Mr. Lehrer’s annual holiday party. “They were all the recognizably young ones,” said Linda Winslow, the show’s executive producer. But in early November, the staffs were merged into a single 20-person bullpen…
Martin commentary: The writing is so on the wall. You’re web team cannot be separate from your TV or print team. If you do not have a transition plan for a web-centric future then your program or publication will die. It appears that a severe budget shortfall and the ill-health of its anchor is causing this reassessment at NewsHour but maybe desperation is the mother of reinvention.
Reportedly causing quite a stir over in Germany, where the authors originate. Nothing terribly new, but well worth a read. Sections include:
Would I be remiss if I didn’t ask my readers to think where our cultural and religious institutions fit in this?
Please let me know whether you’ve found Quaker books, pamphlets, videos, anything, from recent years, that [shed light on the reader’s situation]. Whether our motive is to make Quakers simply glow in the dark, or to one-up somebody else, internal or external, it’s all about us. If we can simply speak from where we are at this moment… that’s all I really yearn for. That’s what I want Friends to be known for.
If it is true that the public at large doesn’t know who Quakers are, then now is as good a time as any for us to raise the Quaker profile in the media, with local stories providing the ‘bread-and-butter’ coverage and some national ‘garnish’ with stories connected to the news.
