Innovation

Most significantly, I think, is the passion you can hear from those practicing the new, non-profit journalism. Freed from the visegrip of industry worry, they are doing the journalism, and you can hear the optimism in their voices. My issue here can still be summed up in one word: scale. That’s the issue before us, even as journalism re-invents itself intriguingly.

ProPublica offers a handy index of the aptly named “Investigations Elsewhere.” Pulling from sources as diverse as the Wall Street Journal, Parade and Mothers Jones, and including major dailies around the country, it’s a great showcase, and check-in on the state of longer-form investigative pieces. We see a half dozen new pieces added daily.

In fact, lower-cost entrants — AOL, Yahoo/Associated Content, Demand +++ — aren’t just pests; they’re changing the economics of producing content. That’s not a small issue. It may well lead the next wave of disruption.

The Onion: Satisfying the 3 Remaining Globe Readers

The mobile revolution is transformative, not a niche of what is mainstream today.

While investors have reacted negatively to drain on profits, Google’s aggressive hiring is an audacious move for market share — what smart companies, with the means, do in a recession.

We could say that news companies — from Slate to the Journal and Times — have figured out that playing the ad game by someone else’s rules didn’t make a lot of sense. In the game of gross numbers, they couldn’t win.

Stated simply: I am the new home page.

Thinking about the recent terminations at the Washington Post and CNN, though, I wonder if the press priesthood is still another cultural institution in the process of being swept away, encumbered as much as it has by habit as by principle.

Certainly in Playboy’s case they make money by being in other businesses. To begin with, it was the magazine that carried the brand; now the brand carries the magazine.