Blog Pattern Language
By Sam Martin - November 30, 2009
Should content be free or should readers have to pay for what they read and see and listen to? This question has been asked more frequently over the past two months as Steven Brill, the founder of Journalism Online and a proponent of the idea that not all content should be free, has been engaging audiences around the country to promote his new pay for play model called the Reader Revenue Platform (he launched in April ’09). Zach Seward at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab has an excellent breakdown of what the model offers. As far as I can tell, media sites can choose from a variety of options, but ideally a good chunk of the revenue will come from committed readers — those who visit the site on a regular basis.
Blog Pattern Language
By Sam Martin - November 6, 2008
Yesterday – the day after an historic election – there was a run on the newspaper industry. People were buying hundreds of copies at a time of their local daily. When newsstands in New York and Washington sold out, crowds were said to have gathered at the Times and Post headquarters looking for copies announcing the new Obama presidency. There were also reports of pilfering at coin operated newspaper machines.
Blog Pattern Language
By Sam Martin - October 23, 2008
In the past two weeks, there’s been at least a dozen stories in the mainstream and not-so-mainstream media about the importance of innovation in a recession. For businesses, refocusing on R&D and innovation really is a good strategy in down times. There’s plenty of historic evidence to back the claim up (the invention of farming technologies and civil engineering breakthroughs in the Great Depression, alternative energy investments in the early 1970s, and a sharpening of Internet business models after the dot com bust in the late 90s).
