Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson on the Future of Free | Epicenter | Wired.com
Hmmm, what does "Anderson's Law" -- that in the digital age, the price of nearly everthing approaches free -- mean for journalism? Here's the most useful passage:"Anderson sees many areas of digital content as obeying this law, including music, video, and video games (the big three 'shiny disc' industries), news, books, and e-mail. Under Anderson’s model, people will continue to pay good money to save time (that is, those who have more money than time will), lower their risk (such as paying to assure that their Second Life land will still be there, or that their operating system will be supported), because they love something (such as buying virtual items in free videogames), or to increase their status in a community."So people pay for time, security and status -- not quality of information. However, news can perhaps *indirectly* provide users with some of those. That's the power of information, right?
N.Y. Times mines its data to identify words that readers find abstruse » Nieman Journalism Lab
This would have been awesome if it had surfaced two years ago, when I was studying for the GRE and actually quizzing myself on words like "laconic" and "inchoat" -- most of which I haven't encountered since. I guess I don't read enough Maureen Dowd.
Surprise! J-school grads are finding jobs
Saw this article (via the Nieman Journalism Lab Twitter feed) by Jeff Bercovici at Daily Finance. It says that people leaving journalism grad programs in New York (Columbia, CUNY) are actually finding jobs at newspapers, magazines, etc.And just as I was thinking to myself "duh, that's because media companies are laying off the old work force and hiring cheap, web-savvy youngsters" I got to the last graph of the article:"My guess is at least some of it is a direct result of the massive staff cutbacks just about every media organization has enacted in the past couple years. It's a corporate cliche to lay people off and euphemize it as 'restructuring,' but you can be sure that some of the companies that are letting go well-paid editors and writers in their 40s and 50s are quietly stocking up on fresh j-school grads whose lack of real-word experience is at least partly made up for by their effortless fluency in the ways of the web -- and their willingness to work for $35,000 a year."
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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