Eliminate the middle-man. This classic piece of business advice recently received an unusual interpretation: the literary agent, commonly seen as the middle-man between author and publishing house, is circumventing the publishing house! The Guardian has reported on star literary agent Andrew ... Read More
The newspapers of yore had two dependable revenue streams: subscribers and advertisers. Today’s broadsheets draw money from the same sources, but funding problems at even the most mainstream papers are commonplace. Murdoch and his News Corporation, ever the industry leader, have a plan to put ... Read More
Today it started to cost me four dollars a week to keep a clean conscience. No, I’m not giving to the Church. I’m paying money to read the news (gasp!). Yes, after praising Rupert Murdoch’s scheme to keep money flowing through the journalism industry, I’ve subscribed to the London Times online. I ... Read More
Big news for publishers and bookish types: the number of electronic books sold on Amazon’s Kindle has exceeded the number of hardcover books sold through Amazon’s website, and by quite a bit. For every 100 hardcovers sold, 180 e-books were purchased, and presumably read, on the Kindle. To some ... Read More
Today I was given some pause before writing this post by a friend who made what I thought was a crack about Glenn Greenwald. But now that it’s been cleared up, I continue with my original idea, or more appropriately, with a little praise. Once you’ve taken some time to survey the newspapers of the ... Read More
Articles at The Times (of London) now sit behind a paywall: two bucks a day or four bucks a week; The New York Times is building a paywall as you read; The Christian Science Monitor now publishes its paper weekly instead of daily. Major news organizations are changing, but will paywalls work? Nobody ... Read More
It seems the nation that prides itself on doing things just a little differently has succumbed to the newspaper industry’s woes just like everyone else. The French paper of record has accepted a bid from three business tycoons in order to stay afloat. One of the paper’s new patrons made his billions ... Read More
The blithe feathers of our nation’s patrimony are now literally weighed down by oil, but our government and press already exude the sticky toxins of petroleum. In a sense, petroleum companies are big shareholders in the American political and media machines, and the extent to which change is ... Read More
I spend a lot of time on my laptop. Too much time? Don’t know, don’t care. C’est la vie (moderne), etc. But what does irk me is that I’m stuck reading dry journalistic reporting most of the time. I’m not asking, as Ginsberg once did, to walk into a supermarket and buy what I want with my good looks ... Read More
As Parag and Ayesha wrote yesterday, if today you cannot program computers, it is as though you have the skill to read, but not to write. For this reason, kids are learning programming basics early in their lives using new programs. But what about reading? I began to learn today that electronic ... Read More
A funny satire on the Helen Thomas story jokes that Ari Fleisher, who appeared on cable news shows to condemn Thomas, is, politically speaking, a completely irrelevant person. But when did Thomas' opinions begin to make waves? It seemed before this, when she has actually said things of substance ... Read More
The bipolar extremes of American politics—red states, blue states; with us or against us; cut and run or victory; capitalism or socialism—have now divided Islam into two separate categories. There is an evolving Islam that has the ability, even the desire to coexist with Western secularism, and ... Read More
Oil leaking from a British Petroleum pipe under the sea floor in the Gulf of Mexico has reached land slicking wildlife habitats on the Southern U.S. coast, as well as the animals that live there. Some of the most disturbing photographs of animals harmed by the spill have been taken by Charlie Riedel ... Read More
A good analysis of the coming newspaper paywalls was recently written in The Financial Times by John Gapper. The London Times and The New York Times have announced their intention to create a subscription service in the next year, with the London Times gearing up very quickly. Gapper’s piece focuses ... Read More
Robert Fisk in an institution, a warrior and a stalwart of old media. While writing for an English daily newspaper, The Independent, he spent over three decades reporting on the Middle East and has witnessed changes befall politics and journalism at a remove that has allowed him to remain critical ... Read More
Much is being made about Richard Blumenthal’s Senate race because of a New York Times article published last Monday which accuses Blumenthal of lying about his military record: claiming on camera that he had served in Vietnam when in fact he had not. Blumenthal was a member of the Marine Corp ... Read More
Not being able to find a demo of Google TV online, I am still at a loss as to why I would want Google TV. It was perhaps telling that at Google’s I/O developer conference the following “interesting facts” were used to introduce Google TV: 1. The average American watches five hours of TV a day. 2 ... Read More
A New York Times piece by Andrew Rice about the economics of Internet startups gives a seemingly accurate and sad account of the state of information, which was once known as knowledge. Irony abounds: the NYT piece was longish and informative enough that, according to its own reporting, it isn’t ... Read More
So we all know that institutions are conservative by their nature as are the old people who typically occupy their venerable posts. The American Presidency is no exception and Obama, though he runs a comparatively tech savvy White House, alas, does not Twitter. The Economist has come out against his ... Read More
Nobody likes a showoff, China, and now that you’re rising like the sea level during a tsunami, the world’s nations are trying to put you down. Will the world ever understand you?Take, for example, the recent release of a secret recording made during the final hours of the Copenhagen Climate Change ... Read More
Orion Jones previously wrote for Catalonia Today, Barcelona's English-language newspaper, and read for The Barcelona Review, a contemporary review of fiction. He lives in Barcelona, Spain.
Original content is for Non-commercial use under Creative Commons. Except where otherwise noted.
Some Rights Reserved. Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
