The Quote

Filmmaker Peter Weir, talking about his career and his newly released “The Way Back,” a tale of survival. “Really as a filmmaker you spend all your life working on simplification. That’s what you aim for if you’re lucky enough to have a long career.”
Well-said, and applies to those crafting the future of news as well.

“Conventional wisdom says the Internet is making information more widely available, but that it also may be reducing the quality of that information and the number of people—journalists—paid to produce it.”

How many “tastes” does Hunch understand so far?
In our database we currently have 20 billion, what we call edges, which are essentially taste maps of a person to an object. It’s growing exponentially too.

That’s the conclusion of a McKinsey “study” that bring a lot of numbers — but a set of assumptions that are mind-boggling to the question of the “balance” of customer benefit and producer value on the web. Seems to be it places 1990 assumptions on the 2010 world. But, it makes a case to potential McKinsey clients: Time for the customers to pay up — and we can help you to get them to do that.

Bay Citizen’s Jonathan Weber explains the ins and outs of working as a New York Times bureau, nailing some of the difficulties of marrying old and new journalism as the Times reaches beyond its old comfort zone.

Bewkes is on to something all savvy media execs should get. The customer wants the technology — and the platform of delivery — to be transparent. We want what we want, and we don’t want to be nickel-and-dimed along the way. Single pricing, what I’ve called ”all-access pricing” across, depending on product, print, broadcast, cablecast, mobile and computer will be a winner with consumers — if the product itself is high-quality.

Why couldn’t newspaper companies do what Patch announced — a nationwide network of hyperlocal sites?

“It’s the legacy crap,” one veteran with feet in both camps told me. “Instead of burning it down and starting all over, they just experiment.”

Pricing’s been a big issue, and as I recently pointed out, (“The Newsonomics of the Fading 80/20 rule”) the latest circulation revenues are problematic, with more companies going negative in circ revenue than positive. They may have found the point of price resistance — especially for diminished print products.

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.

“I think the notion of the “Chinese Wall” between advertising and content is really antiquated,” marketer Alexis Maybank, a fashion “flash sale” site entrpreneur, told the Wall Street Journal, which headlined its story, “Media and Retail Firms Meld Business Models Online.”