By Christopher B. Daly
Let’s start the week with some required reading. From the Times:
–David Carr on I’m not sure what exactly. This sounds like a mash-up of several columns.
–Here’s a piece about some popular new conservative website, Independent Journal Review. (It’s always odd to see young conservatives. What’s left for them to grow up into?)
–Sleek and shiny Conde Nast gets a sleek and shiny new hq. Just don’t look down on your readers.
–The Times demurely reports its own quarterly earnings. I’d say this glass is half full. Yes, they lost a little money overall last quarter, but don’t bury the lead. Here it is, in grafs 6+7:
While the print business continued its steady decline, with advertising revenue dropping 5.3 percent, the company showed growth in its digital business. Digital-only subscribers — a number closely watched by analysts, some of whom suspect that growth may soon plateau — increased by 44,000 during the quarter, the best quarterly digital subscriber growth in nearly two years. The Times now has 875,000 digital-only subscribers.
Third-quarter digital advertising revenue was $38.2 million, a 16.5 percent increase compared with the third quarter of 2013. Mr. Thompson, the chief executive, said that the digital advertising growth came from a number of areas, including Paid Posts, the company’s push into so-called native advertising, in which ads resemble editorial content.
Just watch out for those “native ads,” and you’ll be fine in the digital future.
–At the new website First Look, zillionaire owner Pierre Omidyar is discovering that it’s not easy to lead a newsroom full of talented, difficult people. The e-Bay founder, who sank $250 million into this news venture, is learning something about how great Ben Bradlee really was.
Mr. Omidyar, according to people with knowledge of internal discussions at First Look who spoke on condition of anonymity, seemed not to realize what he had gotten into by hiring so many aggressive and competitive journalists and then trying to manage them largely from his home in Hawaii, with only sporadic visits to First Look’s offices.
Ouch.
–And from the op-ed page, Tom Friedman weighs in with this thought: what if they gave a war and no reporters showed up? Imagine what ISIS will do when they know that no one’s watching.
ELSEWHERE. . .
NPR’s “On the Media” is on target.
Robert Krulwich had a good show about the “War of the Worlds” on his RadioLab. (which is on death row)
On CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” host Brian Stelter went a few rounds with a founder of the Weather Channel (“… I am the founder” he lectured Brian) who is a self-proclaimed “climate change skeptic.” My question: who cares what this guy thinks? The planet is going to settle this argument for us.
The Boston Globe had an amusing piece in its improving Sunday “Ideas” section about the hidebound typographical practices of the esteemed Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Turns out, the SJC is stuck on Courier, a “monospaced” font, where all the letters take up the same space. This allows the court to enforce its ancient rules about the length of briefs by imposing limits based on page numbers. The court could readily update its practices by imposting a word count and allowing lawyers to use cooler fonts. No rush — it’s only the oldest continuously sitting court in the New World.
