Archive for October 2008
At Issue } essential reading
Not Over Yet
Let's hope all these pollsters know what they're doing. Otherwise, journalism is in for a very bad hangover.
Oprah: Heartfelt Storyteller or Paid Shill?
Oprah’s proclamation that Amazon’s Kindle (e-reader) is life-changing created more noise in the blogosphere than any activity orchestrated by Amazon’s marketing department over the past three months. Yet, this was hardly a heartfelt moment. Amazon paid for the product placement on Oprah’s show.
Libelous Liddy
What responsibility does the business side of broadcasting have in validating the veracity of the political advertising it accepts?
Economy Shrinks as Consumers Cut Back
The Commerce Department reported this morning that consumers sharply cut their spending this summer, causing the United States economy to shrink at annual rate of 0.3 percent. By almost all accounts, the economy is now in recession.
Obama's Secret Weapons: Internet, Databases and Psychology
Obama is the first candidate to successfully integrate technology with a revamped model of political organization that stresses volunteer participation and feedback on a massive scale, erecting a vast, intricate machine set to fuel an unprecedented get-out-the-vote drive in the final days before Tuesday's election.
Where the Streets Have Names: Learning from Bono's Facebook Dilemma
Your personal brand is yours to define, cultivate, nurture, and craft. Ignorance is not bliss. Everything you post and share on the web collectively contributes to an online persona. It's the curation of all of our disparate pieces online that collectively paint a picture of who we are. Perception is reality.
Mourning Old Media’s Decline
The paradox of all these layoff announcements is that newspapers and magazines do not have an audience problem — newspaper Web sites are a vital source of news, and growing — but they do have a consumer problem.
Christian Science Monitor Gives Up On Print
The Christian Science Monitor, a highly respected 100-year-old paper with a circulation a lot smaller than its reputation, just announced that it will stop printing issues for good in April of next year.
Copyright and Politics
Throughout this election season, Americans have used the extraordinary capacity of digital technologies to capture and respond to arguments with which they disagree. But this explosion in citizen-generated political speech has been met with a troubling response: the increasing use of copyright laws as tools for censorship.
10 Years Later, Misunderstood DMCA is the Law That Saved the Web
If you're wondering whom to thank for the Web 2.0 explosion in interactive websites, consider sending a bouquet to Congress. Today's internet is largely an outgrowth of the much-reviled Digital Millennium Copyright Act that lawmakers passed in 1998, and President Clinton signed into law exactly a decade ago today.
