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
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
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
At this point, it’s no use rehashing the state of the news business or the state of journalism (two very different things). That’s been done to death by Alan Mutter, Ken Doctor, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis and countless others. So let’s just stipulate that the news business as we’ve known it is comprehensively melting down, … Continue reading
