Wired, on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Hearst said on January 9 that it would try to sell P-I and might shut down the newspaper or pursue other options, including publishing the newspaper only on the Internet, if it could not find a buyer in 60 days.
Going online cuts all the costs of paper, ink, and transportation, but no one really knows if newspaper journalism can survive without the actual newspaper.
This is a little old, but here’s why Daring Fireball doesn’t have comments:
I wanted to write a site for someone it’s meant for. That reader I write for is a second version of me. I’m writing for him. He’s interested in the exact same things I’m interested in; he reads the exact same websites I read. I want him to like this website so much that he reads it from the top to the bottom, and he reads everything. Every single word. The copyright statement, what software I use, he’s read it all.
The Rocky Mountain News, a E.W. Scripps newspaper, is closing this week, just shy of its 150th anniversary. Here’s a bit from the paper’s own coverage:
Rich Boehne, chief executive officer of Scripps, broke the news to the Rocky staff at noon today, ending nearly three months of speculation over the paper’s future. He called the paper a victim of a terrible economy and an upheaval in the newspaper industry.
The New York Times paints a bleak picture as well:
In the world of podcasts, there are many choices, especially when it comes to shows centered around technology (and even more so centered on Apple technology), but very few of these podcasts would ever talk about the Macintosh Quadra 660AV, the Apple Lisa, or the Performa 5200.
That’s just one reason the RetroMacCast ( iTunes Link) stands out. Each week, James and John sit down and discuss Apple news, unique eBay auctions (like a pallet of Color Classics and PowerBook Duos), and the “Retro Mac of the Week.”
I love retro computing, and I like well-done mods. RetroMacCast forum member option8 loves both, it seems. The hardware hacker has put a Mac mini inside a Apple Disk II case. Check out that link for photos.
Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new business model relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens — as countless publishers have seen happen as a result of the recession — the stool can’t possibly stand.
[…]
This notion of charging for content is an old idea not simply because newspapers and magazines have been doing it for more than four centuries. It’s also something they used to do at the dawn of the online era, in the early 1990s. Back then there were a passel of online service companies, such as Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi and AOL. They used to charge users for the minutes people spent online, and it was naturally in their interest to keep the users online for as long as possible. As a result, good content was valued. When I was in charge of TIME’s nascent online-media department back then, every year or so we would play off AOL and CompuServe; one year the bidding for our magazine and bulletin boards reached $1 million.
…we thought it was worth pointing out that it costs the Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead.
[…]
Are we trying to say the the New York Times should force all its print subscribers onto the Kindle or else? No. That would kill ad revenues and also, not everyone loves the Kindle.
This is where the print newspaper and the digital newspaper are colliding. The traditional once-a-day cycle allows more time for reporting and thoughtful discussion about how a story should be framed. What happened in this case is that normal news reporting, in which a story changes in content, tone and emphasis as more is learned, played out in front of the whole world, instead of in the newsroom before publication. In the process, Kennedy took an unfair hit.
The New York Times describes Fusion-io, a start-up Steve Wozniak has joined:
The company relies on high-speed flash memory, commonly used to store data on an iPod or digital camera. Fusion-io takes many flash chips and packs them together on a module that is a bit bigger than a deck of cards. The module slides into certain slots inside servers. That gives the main computing chip quick access to data stored on the flash chips. In traditional systems, servers must hunt for data on separate storage systems linked to the processor by a slower connection.
Starring the Computer is a site dedicated to pointing out computers in TV shows and movies. Pretty fun to click through.
Macworld dug this up:
Instead of typing instructions, the user rolls the mouse on a desktop. As it moves, the cursor - an arrow that points to specific points on the screen - moves accordingly. The user can give instructions by pointing the mouse to pictures on the screen, such as a file cabinet or wastepaper basket. Or, by using a graphics package called MacPaint, he can draw his own creations.
Michael Miller of PC Mag looks back at his first interview with the Macintosh team:
Most of the time I was meeting with other members on the team, but I remember Jobs coming in – even then he was very charismatic: intense, proud of the work, and a bit prickly about any criticism. He and his folks were quick to put down the IBM PC and its clones for not pushing the envelope and instead settling for “mediocrity.”