For Monday, May 26, 2014, some media stories of note:
David Warsh, a former Boston Globe economics columnists writing for Politico, provides a critique of the recent New York Times innovation report that had identified strategic shortcomings in the organization's digital readiness. It's a disaster of a report, Warsh argues, because it sets the Times on a race to the bottom against such entities as Huffington Post instead of up the food chain against Reuters or Bloomberg News. The report, he says, fails to note that the new digital organizations lack a business model and that the Times would abdicate a very capable, fixable position by pursuing what the report suggests.
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Paul Ford, writing for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, doesn't buy into the argument that the recent European Union court ruling that permits people to ask that personal content be scrubbed from Google's search engine is the death knell for free speech. He speaks from experience as a former Harper's archivist that it is very possible for Google to coexist with requests that some content not surface through search engine queries. He makes the case for scrubbing search results.
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Amazon revolutionized book sales, and the company's intersection with journalism in book form is considerable. But its recent contract dispute with Hachette over pricing has confirmed its critics' worst fears, writes Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times. Rather than put the customer first, Amazon is choking the oxygen supply to Hachette and leaving itself open to stronger regulatory oversight.
David Warsh, a former Boston Globe economics columnists writing for Politico, provides a critique of the recent New York Times innovation report that had identified strategic shortcomings in the organization's digital readiness. It's a disaster of a report, Warsh argues, because it sets the Times on a race to the bottom against such entities as Huffington Post instead of up the food chain against Reuters or Bloomberg News. The report, he says, fails to note that the new digital organizations lack a business model and that the Times would abdicate a very capable, fixable position by pursuing what the report suggests.
***
Paul Ford, writing for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, doesn't buy into the argument that the recent European Union court ruling that permits people to ask that personal content be scrubbed from Google's search engine is the death knell for free speech. He speaks from experience as a former Harper's archivist that it is very possible for Google to coexist with requests that some content not surface through search engine queries. He makes the case for scrubbing search results.
***
Amazon revolutionized book sales, and the company's intersection with journalism in book form is considerable. But its recent contract dispute with Hachette over pricing has confirmed its critics' worst fears, writes Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times. Rather than put the customer first, Amazon is choking the oxygen supply to Hachette and leaving itself open to stronger regulatory oversight.
