Like nearly everyone else in the journo-blogosphere I have been reading writer Dan Baum’s account, on Twitter, of how he got fired by the New Yorker. It is a canny PR move on Baum’s part, and the New Yorker is a fascinating enough institution that a little glance under the tent… Read full post »

At Fort Mason last night it was Yet Another Panel on the Future of Newspapers. I went because of who was on the panel: the impressive investigative reporter and former Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll; Slate founder Michael Kinsley; and Phil Bronstein, my ertwhile boss at the old… Read full post »

In 1994 Louis Rossetto cranked up HotWired and believed he was ushering in the professionalization of the Web. It was time to rout all the anarchists and the hackers and the amateurs who thought the Internet was all about self-expression (and them). “The era of public-access Internet has come t… Read full post »

There’s a ridiculous amount of chatter in the tech blogosphere about who’s going to buy Twitter. And if the right offer comes along with enough zeros behind it, I don’t doubt that Twitter will sooner or later sell itself. But I doubt its founders are going to do it any time… Read full post »

Once upon a time, there was a Web company that was based not in Silicon Valley but in Santa Monica. It grew at a breathtaking rate. All of its content was created by its users, and though the pages those users created tended to look jumbled and messy, there was an…

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I did a lot of digging around in the numbers around blogging for my book, so I’m on alert when I read a piece like Mark Penn’s look at pro blogging in the Wall Street Journal, which is getting lots of attention this morning. A little skepticism is definitely in order…

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Returning from a mostly-offline spring break vacation, I find that the future-of-news debate has been going round in circles. In the most interesting turn of the wheel, Nick Carr weighed in with an elaboration of his argument that Google is a vampirical middleman, sucking the lifeblood from the media…

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It’s turned into the silly season here in future-of-journalism land, what with the AP’s muddled new campaign to try to stop websites from linking to its content and the latest wave of cockamamie plans to save newspapers by (take your pick) putting them on the government dole, seizing some…

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One of the points I make in Say Everything is that the reverse-chronological format that blogs use is embedded in the DNA of the Web from early high-profile uses in places like Tim Berners-Lee’s first website at info.cern and in Marc Andreessen’s NCSA What’s New page. Today’s…

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In early 2000 I got a call from a producer at Fresh Air, asking if I’d like to contribute some technology commentary. Fresh Air is, to my mind, one of the very best shows on radio, so yes, I was excited. For my tryout, I wrote a brief piece about this… Read full post »

 

 

I was away with my family for a spring break retreat up the coast all last week, hanging out with the seals, when this project slipped from alpha to beta, so I missed the excitement. 

Since I'm about a month behind my personal writing schedule on the… Read full post »