Bob Morris on Apr 14, 2009, 8:30 am Guests will be asked if they want a paper rather than just getting outside the door. They estimate this will cut distribution by 18 million copies a year. That’s a lot of dead trees. Much of the USA Today circulation is via hotels, so this is bad news for them, not that many hotel [...] Bob Morris on Mar 16, 2009, 8:12 pm Just published last Friday, Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” has already become a classic on the subject. Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. [...] Bob Morris on Mar 14, 2009, 5:20 pm Shirky “If the old [newspaper] model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke. Why? Because the core problem [newspaper] publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense [...] Bob Morris on Mar 10, 2009, 7:43 pm The Guardian is opening up their news to everyone with Open Platform, with an open API. it’s free, you can do whatever you want with the news, reprint it, mash it up, whatever. However they will runs ads in it. This is a smart move. Mashable Launch partners include The Cass Sculpture Foundation, which [...] Bob Morris on Mar 6, 2009, 2:20 pm Their parent company Hearst said the Seattle P-I will either close or go online only within 60 days if a buyer can’t be found. Given that Seattle is a highly wired city with lots of techies, an online-only newspaper might well have a better chance of surviving there rather than elsewhere. This is probably [...] Bob Morris on Feb 27, 2009, 8:44 pm The Phoenix Principle on the cluelessness of newspapers Just as I predicted in this blog months ago, when Sam Zell leveraged up Tribune in his buyout, the odds of any particular newspaper surviving is not very good. It was 3 years ago when I was talking to the CFO at the LATimes about the future [...] Bob Morris on Feb 27, 2009, 10:56 am The San Francisco Chronicle plans to fire half its employees, then raise the price of the paper and charge for online access. Such a breathtakingly stupid plan seems typical of the newspaper business. Why, would readers want to pay more for dumbed down or non-existent content? Let’s hope a buyer is found. Some observers speculated [...] | Independent Voter NetworkArticles by Bob Morris on California and Arizona renewable energy, budget and border issues |
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