Eubie's notes

I Want Meida: The co-founding editor of Wired and founder of The Industry Standard argues that print as the medium for news delivery is “passing.” That’s why he’s launching a blog service company.

IWM: Is print media on its way out?

Battelle: No, I wouldn’t say that print media is on its way out, and I’ve been saying this since we launched Wired in ’92. I would say, however, that it better be very well justified if it is going to exist.

Print is an extraordinarily important, wonderful medium. But I think we’ve seen the passing of print as the medium of news delivery. There are plenty of examples where print was the best we could do because it’s all we had. But the online medium is better.

Kate Bush

Rare lyrics

CS Monitor: A study found that two thirds of test subjects’ waking hours were spent using media.

NY Times: Many financial planners advise saving for retirement before putting money aside for a child’s college education.

NY Times: Some experts have been making waves by suggesting that it may make more sense to withdraw bigger amounts in the early years of retirement.

Recent spending studies show that since as one moves from their 60s to their 80s, they spend less in all categories except health care.

Wired News: Blood flows to the parts of the brain associated with anxiety and impulse control when liars do their thing. As a result, MRI machines spot fibbers with more than 90 percent accuracy.

NY Times: The total income of Americans in 2003, adjusted for inflation, was 4 percent smaller than in 1999, new tax return data showed …

Wired News: The military wants to be a good public citizen by pumping more biodiesel into its tanks and trucks. The fleets will burn about 6 million gallons of the enviromentally friendly fuel this year. By Dan Orzech.

By JD Lasica on New Media Musings

Bob Cauthorn, former GM of SFGate, in Corante today: Newspapers, meet precipice: It’s the product, stupid. He uses Tuesday’s announcement of 500 layoffs at the New York Times/Boston Globe/IHT as the jumping-off point for an essay on the newspaper readership death spiral. Excerpt:

In October metro newspapers across the country will post astonishing year-over-year declines.

The circulation fall-off at large metro papers will be between 9% and 15%. Smaller market and mid-sized market newspapers will fair slightly better. But across America, the average decline will be somewhere between 3% and 5% year-over-year. …

Nationally, the average time people spend on newspaper web sites is under four minutes. Clearly, people are reading a story or two and leaving. That’s not to say that online readership doesn’t matter — hell, online readership is my religion — but let’s be honest about how people use newspaper web sites. You can’t transform the media by lying to yourself about it. …

Digital media will be recognized for exactly what it is: a full medium in its own right, with its own internal logic, unique advantages, specific shortcomings and opportunities. Newspaper companies will begin to ask the proper questions about digital media, instead of simply mumbling about cannibalization and print.

What are the right questions? Just a few starters: what form should storytelling take online, what is the natural and robust role the community plays, what does geo-focused and just-in-time news delivery look like, does data presentaion itself become a story, what does true interactivity looks like, how can the social conversation be distributed now, what level of personalization is valuable and what level is numbing to the intellect, how can digital media provide real value to local advertisers?

All of it, dead on.

Wired News: Blog network pioneers keep their finances close to the chest, but salary information for scribes behind hit sites like Gizmodo, Fleshbot and Gawker is starting to trickle out. Time to quit your day job and blog for a living? Commentary by Adam Penenberg.