July 2010
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Work in progress
In the handful of responses to my recent posts, I got the sense that people thought I was being glib, obvious or horrifically commercial (or perhaps all three) when I talk about journalism as a product.
One contact told me on Facebook that it was a “service”, not a product. Another former colleague said that the difference wasn’t simply between lazy and non-lazy journalists:...
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Weeknotes: 16
Lots of time this week was spent on Project Moke — much more time than I wanted, to be honest. Chinese bureaucracy continues to confound me and I’ve been given conflicting advice from three different diplomatic outposts that now threatens to scupper, or at least delay, my travel plans.
As a freelance, I’m beginning to understand, you really have to value your time. Journalism (at...
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Is journalism a product?
Paul Ford picked up on the conversation I had with Tom Taylor over the weekend, writing about how real editors ship. He adds a few new useful elements to the conversation, including a great synopsis of exactly what I was trying to get at:
Editors are first and foremost there to ship the product without getting sued. They order the raw materials—words, sounds, images—mill them to approved...
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The reading revolution?
Amazon has put forward an apparently stunning piece of news: Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books.
Indeed, it goes further: “Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books,” we’re told. It’s an impressive line that’s being parroted by the...
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Weeknotes: 15
The last week was, one way or another, a bit of a working wash-out. After a dashing start — including chatting about a very interesting little project with a client — I managed to give myself a dose of food poisoning. It was probably the sickest I’d been since a similar bout in Kenya several years ago, and so really wiped out the rest of the week for me.
I did, however, manage to have a...
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Shipping news
Here’s a great little piece by my friend Tom Taylor that points out “you’ve either shipped or you haven’t”.You’ve either poured weeks, months or even years of your life into bringing a product or a service into the world, or you haven’t… whatever you do next, you’ve shipped. You’ve joined the club.
It’s great because it appeals to you, if you’re a member...
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Weeknotes: 14
They’re sporadic, these updates. But since I am back from a two-week holiday (family visits in Britain, a wedding in Norway) I feel as if it’s time to remind myself of recent progress.
Planning for Project Moke continues: it’s in the planning phase, but fingers crossed I should be heading to China for a week or two in August. I’m really looking forward to how this...
America's Broadband Dilemma →
Here’s a piece I wrote for the latest issue of Technology Review, asking the question of whether the US Federal Communications Commission can bring access to everyone in the country and achieve world-leading speeds at the same time.
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60 second expert: Why good airlines struggle
On a trip in Europe last week, we had the displeasure of flying with Ryanair, one of the world’s most notorious low-cost airlines. The company itself is an extreme example of what I’ll term “ultra-capitalism”: it took an existing idea — the model of US carrier Southwest Airlines — and stripped it down to produce a sort of lean and competitive predator of a company that...
