Great news, hopefully all medai sources follow this example. I have no doubt it will be more profitable than the print news ever was.The Times to Charge for Frequent Access to Its Web Site:
“The New York Times announced Wednesday that it intended to charge frequent readers for access to its Web site, a step being debated across the industry that nearly every major newspaper has so far feared to take.
Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site.”
“Early 2001″, why not now?
Some of the photos I took at the post-election party in and around Park Plaza Hotel today. ►►►read more
Shmarya Rosenberg in the FM War Room. Ben Garvin for The New York Times
I used to get upset when people compared my blog to Shmarya’s but then I realized that these are the very people who think that since the New York Times and the New York Post are sold on the same street corner, they both must be newspapers.
Just few years ago I was berated for merely linking to his blog and last week, surprisingly the nasal and monotonous radio host Zev Brenner gave Shmarya a microphone of the most listened to radio program in the post-holocaust metropolis. Ma nishtana? Behold, “Change has come to America”. Oh, yes Shmarya was in the New York Times. And here is the ironic paradox, the market where Zev Brenner sells his radio signal negates the popular culture and at the same time is defined and validated by the popular culture. So literally if you are in the hated mass media, than you exist and visa versa.
But there is more. Why there is no good music today? Why create when you can mix? It’s a DJ culture, get yourself a spin table and mix away. A perfect Web 2.0 set up for Judaism. Two thousand years of hyperlinked quotes about quotes. Your value is commensurate with your command of the quotes and the spin, not your own prose or opinions, not even your unauthorized dialogues with God himself, God forbid.
I once asked Shmarya about his competitors, who are they? “VIN” – answered Shmarya without hesitation. Indeed Shmarya copies the entire articles for the same reason VIN does. The actual newspapers where the articles originate are treif and that includes the very NY Times that gives Shmarya the legitimacy and pays the journalist to actually write and investigate ready to cut and paste articles. Indeed if you strip VIN and the Failed Messiah of the “focus”, it’s the same readership and the same link fest. Steal articles wholesale, DJ news. The ideological differences between VIN and FM are incidental but the readership is the same, the same derivative DJ culture of link and spin, the same toxic morass of anonymity.
Yet Shmarya deserves the credit for his maniac perseverance, for putting up with the death threats, the horrible fundamentalists nastiness, the rejection by the commissars and apparatchiks. In life it’s all about the persistent perseverance and I sincerely wish that Shmarya sees a glimmer of happiness, he deserves this above all. And the very people who object to his blog could have killed the “creativity” with love long time ago, but what would they read instead?
In the wake of the Leib Tropper scandal, it occurred to me that the reasons I started the media company few years back are still intact. The Jewish blogs are still run by the illiterate and the unenlightened, the repetitive “cut and paste” brigade. Narrowcasting a niche in the most provincial sense of that description. The style is the reflexive regurgitation, the vigilante vegetarianism around the sacred cows. The firm determination of leaving no question unasked. The monotonous alphabet glued apart by the toxic slime of anonymity.
The Jewish MSM media is still like a camel in an ice ring. The cliché clinic. Hopelessly out of the required shallowness. Assuming the target audience of an average autistic child on a deserted island but lacking in juvenile mischief required for covering the heimisher stories. The paper rags are neuvo skilled in paraphrasing the blogs so that the aforementioned blogs have something to “cut and paste” about.
Washington Post – The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition):
“David Marburger is a First Amendment lawyer who, along with his economist brother Daniel, is stirring a minor controversy in the blogosphere with a proposal that might empower newspapers, or any news organization that spends the bulk of its budget on original reporting. They want to amend the copyright law so that it restores “unfair competition rights” — which once gave us the power to sue rivals if our stories were being pirated. That change would give news organizations rights that they could enforce in court if “parasitic” free-rider Web sites (the heavy excerpters) refused to bargain with them for a fee or a contract. Marburger said media outlets could seek an order requiring the free-rider to postpone its commercial use or even hand over some advertising revenue linked to the free-riding.”
Also via Bnet: Could Copyright Change Fix Old Media? David Marburger Q&A.
Leonard Cohen and Philip Glass. Photo by Lorca Cohen ( Leonard's daughter)
A great interview in the Guardian, you need to seep it like a great old wine. It can really teach you, put your ear to it – ‘I’m blessed with a certain amnesia’
“ I always had a notion that I had a tiny garden to cultivate. I never thought I was really one of the big guys. And so the work that was in front of me was just to cultivate this tiny corner of the field that I thought I knew something about, which was something to do with self-investigation without self-indulgence. Just pure confession I never felt was really interesting. But confession filtered through a tradition of skill and hard work is interesting to me. So that was my tiny corner, and I just started writing about the things that I thought I knew about or wanted to find out about. That was how it began. I wanted the songs to sound like everybody else’s songs.”
Photo via Shihlun
There is interesting article in the Economist that gets it right (if you don’t count the lip service to the MSM). On the first night of the Iran revolution Twitter was superb and comprehensible, then it quickly disintegrated into unmanageable volume of repetitive low value messages. The old media had been reduced to the pathetic reporting about YouTube videos. And the clear winners are the blogs that can curate and filter the river of news. Economist – Twitter 1, CNN 0:
“Meanwhile the much-ballyhooed Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness. By deluging threads like Iranelection with cries of support for the protesters, Americans and Britons rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran’s government had tried and failed to do. Even at its best the site gave a partial, one-sided view of events. Both Twitter and YouTube are hobbled as sources of news by their clumsy search engines.
Much more impressive were the desk-bound bloggers. Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times waded into a morass of information and pulled out the most useful bits. Their websites turned into a mish-mash of tweets, psephological studies, videos and links to newspaper and television reports. It was not pretty, and some of it turned out to be inaccurate. But it was by far the most comprehensive coverage available in English. The winner of the Iranian protests was neither old media nor new media, but a hybrid of the two.”
Some completing quotes from David Eaves in Newspapers’ decline is a sign of democracy’s health, not a symptom of its death | eaves.ca: Especially interesting the comparison of Boomers to the generation Y:
“Newspapers, in contrast, are many things, but they are not democratic. They are hierarchical authoritarian structures designed to control and shape information. This is not to say they don’t provide a societal benefit—their content contributes to the public discourse. However, how is having a few major media outlets deciding “what is news” democratic, or even good for democracy? The newspaper model isn’t about expanding free speech; it is about limiting it to force readers to listen to what the editor prescribes. When is the last time you had an opinion piece or letter published in a newspaper? There are many more voices in America that deserve to be heard aside from Ivy League educated editors and journalists.
The “necessary for democracy” argument also assumes that readers are less civically engaged if they digest their news online. How absurd. Gen Y is likely far more knowledgeable about their world than Boomers were. The problem is that Boomers appeared more knowledgeable to one another because they all knew the same things. The limited array of media meant people were generally civically minded about the same things and evaluated one another based on how much of the same media they’d seen. The diversity available in today’s media—facilitated greatly by the internet—means it is hard to evaluate someone’s civic mindedness because they may be deeply knowledgeable and engaged in a set of issues you are completely unfamiliar with. Diversity of content and access to it, made possible by the internet, has strengthened our civic engagement.”
