I just finished watching videos of several companies pitching at TechCrunch Disrupt and reading the overviews of the rest, and Mark Suster’s post about whether startups today are solving real problems. You know what the problem with most of the companies at Disrupt is? It’s not just that they seem trivial or transient. It’s that … Continue reading
Last night I finally got around to deleting my Facebook account (really deleted it, not Facebook’s sneaky soft delete). This isn’t a manifesto about all the things wrong with Facebook or a big-think piece on privacy. It just comes down to this: For years, I refused to get an EZ-Pass that would let me go … Continue reading
I’ve been writing a lot about how valuable press releases and content produced by government, school and businesses can be in the new news ecosystem. My company is based on making it easier for “organizationally sponsored” news content to get to the audience that it’s most relevant to. But that doesn’t mean I think journalism … Continue reading
The news business can’t be saved until people are honest about where news really comes from. Continue reading
In my last post, I complained about how the fetish for original reporting makes reporters and editors treat the PR industry like a shameful late-night booty call. My main complaint isn’t one of attribution or credit, but business sense: if there are people out there writing good quality, useful news content that your audience will … Continue reading
This relationship between the news media and its sources is eternal, and frankly it works just fine. What’s surprising (and a little galling) to me is the denial that exists among news mavens about how this all works. Reporters, editors and news pundits treat PR like a regular booty call that they don’t want their friends to know about. Continue reading
Executive compensation at companies, investment banks and funds should force managers to put real money at risk. Continue reading
I want to hate Malcolm Gladwell, but then he writes something interesting enough that I have to grudgingly like his work again. As with all of his work, though, the good and important stuff needs to be parsed out of his articles, which share with his books the tendency to over-inflate a point, or keep … Continue reading
I write all of readMedia’s job postings, and I read a lot of others to see how other people describe jobs and the people they want to hire. I’m more than happy to steal good ideas and crib from people who write better than I do. I stole the “smart and gets things done” formula … Continue reading
Demand Media, Associated Content and even AOL’s Seed initiative got a lot of press a couple of weeks ago thanks to posts on ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch about “content farms” and their pernicious effect on the web. I won’t rehash the arguments except to say that most of them are “moral” rather than practical discussions of … Continue reading
