journal

Blogging vs. print: Some journalists don't get it

A couple of weeks ago I was in Malta at an international conference of technology journalists. Along with other Americans, CNET Executive Editor Tom Merritt and I participated on a panel at the event where we talked about the future of the news business in the age of blogging.

The event was a bit of a culture clash between the Americans and the mostly European and Asian journalists in the audience. To a person, the Americans were pessimistic about the future of print and at least somewhat optimistic about blogging and online journalism.

While none of us predicted that print … Read more

Basic calendar tool

This virtual diary, called myDiary, lets you record your daily activities, thoughts, and tasks. Novices will appreciate its easy-to-navigate user interface.

When first accessing the program through its executable file format, the program requires that you enter a master password. The user interface could benefit from some color because it's pretty plain, but it consists of a slender window with a calendar at the top, a large search button, and a open panel for diary entries. The menu toolbar at the top includes features for navigating between diary entries (the program refers to them as blogs), and inserting time … Read more

Protect sensitive information

Though we got off on a rocky start, this calendar and management program let us log personal information and password-protect it for safe keeping.

At first, we weren't quite sure what to make of Alpha Journal. A very plain and confusing window appeared that asked us to locate a file to use to store our protected data file. From there, we also were asked to create a master password to access files. Once we got past the initial setup, we were impressed with the main user interface. The text editing-style menu and toolbars looked very familiar to us. A … Read more

Podcast: Some European journalists skeptical of blogging

It's hard to find an American print journalist who doesn't also publish online, and most seem to now accept that blogging is here to stay. After witnessing the folding of the of the Rocky Mountain News and the print editions of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer along with struggles at other papers, it seems as if just about everyone realizes that the economics of print are--to say the least--challenging.

But at an international technology conference on the island of Malta (in the Mediterranean, roughly halfway between Europe and Africa), CBS News and CNET technology analyst Larry Magid and CNET Executive … Read more

The Wall Street Journal: There's a free app for that

Good news for news junkies and anyone who can still stomach reading about the stock market: The Wall Street Journal just took the wraps off an eponymous iPhone app, offering news, video, and even podcasts. Better still, there's no charge for the app--or the content.

That may surprise Journal subscribers who pay a little more than $100 per year for unrestricted Web access. But it puts the app on an even footing with The New York Times and USA Today apps, among others, which also provide news at no charge.

The Journal app bears a striking resemblance to the … Read more

Report: Only 3 percent of newspaper reading is done online

Fairly fainting from frivolousness, I accidentally wandered onto the Nieman Journalism Lab site the other day.

This is a group of people who seem associated with Harvard, and are trying to make sense of that strange thing that some describe as "quality journalism."

I went there for a little heavy relief again Tuesday and discovered a very interesting tract, written by Martin Langeveld.

You know I won't get all the numerical nuances right when I tell you that he stared at a lot of numbers, accessed a number of electronic fingers for help, made one or two … Read more

Mandate for papers, advertisers: Innovate or die

Has it finally arrived, the post-advertising age? Advertising Age, nomen est omen, recently ran a story on the blurring line between commercial and editorial content, as media companies are facing a fiercely competitive marketplace amid declining advertising budgets (according to the Newspaper Association of America, advertising revenue in 2008 decreased by 17 percent, to $38 billion), and the looming crisis of the news industry as a whole (see Clay Shirky’s seminal essay on "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable").

As if to further prove the point, the Los Angeles Times carried a Page 1 advertisement on Thursday that … Read more

Techmeme founder: WSJ, NYT are aggregators

Updated at 3:40 p.m. PDT to include Wall Street Journal's deals for some of the news that it aggregates.

Techmeme is one of the sites that Robert Thomson, managing editor of the The Wall Street Journal, presumably thinks is a "parasite" or "tech tapeworm in the intestines of the Internet."

The Web site aggregates links to stories. Along with the links is a short description of the news. Thomson and others in the newspaper industry say it's unfair and unlawful for Web sites to profit from their content without compensating them. On … Read more

Google to publishers: We're not evil or illegal

A day after the editor of The Wall Street Journal referred to online news aggregators--particularly Google and its Google News product--as "parasites or tech tapeworms," and the chairman of the Associated Press announced an initiative to protect print media content from infringing use online, Google has fired back in a blog.

The gist of Tuesday's blog post, penned by Google associate general counsel Alexander Macgillivray: don't point fingers at us.

"We show snippets and links under the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the United States Copyright Act," he wrote. "Even though the … Read more