Nick Bergus Thoughts on what media do, and can do better, and other things

The most dominant, but least hip, operating system
Scott Rosenberg, in Technologizer’s “The Future of Windows”
(It is actually comparing Microsoft Windows to newspapers, not the other way around, but I say it counts.)
Like the newspaper industry, Microsoft simply cannot trade in today’s significant but ultimately dwindling profits for bets on the future. That’s why you can [...]

Boats for buring Marc Andreessen, quoted by Erick Schonfeld in Andreessen’s Advice To Old Media: “Burn The Boats”
Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the [...]

An aging virgin
Merlin Mann writing on Kung Fu Grippe about the thought process behind the decision to pull full-content RSS feeds from TheAtlantic.com during a redesign
This reeks of the same bush-league decision-making that hobbled Hulu, gets music fans sued, and keeps high-quality content locked in a tower like an aging virgin — too special to be [...]

An aging, impotent beast
Mimi Johnson’s “Did it ever occur to you that even the most deathless love could wear out?”
The people who run newspapers and those who work for them are engaged in useless foreplay. They cling tightly, trying again and again to make the way they’ve always done it still work, but the passion is [...]

Mass extinction
Alan Mutter’s Journicide: A looming, lost generation of scribes
But the loss of a substantial portion of what would have been the next generation of journalists also will be tragic for society. The loss will deprive citizens in the future with the insights that only can be delivered by dedicated professionals with the time, skills [...]

A headline shop
Danny Sullivan’s If Newspapers Were Stores, Would Visitors Be “Worthless” Then?
At the store, the news exec owner greets visitors by asking them what the hell they want. Perplexed, they visitors say they heard about these stories and wanted to know more. The exec shouts at them. “Get the hell out of my store, [...]

Skeletor, Gargamel, Cobra Commander or Wile E Coyote
Umair Haque’s “Is Your Business Useless?”
Business supervillains have something in common with the cartoon supervillains above: they rarely win. That’s because socially useless business is built on shoddy, poor economics — and like most things too good to be true, it rarely lasts for long.
The Titanic, yet again [...]

Wild boars or something; I mean, you don’t want to die with your dick hanging out, do you see what I’m saying?
Primary Colors

The French Revolution
John McQuaid, on Twitter (here, here and here)
When I say “citizen journalism” has a French Revolution vibe, I mean a couple of things (1/3)
Citizen journalism/French Revolution I: CJ reflects a chaotic, [...]

An industrial giant in bankruptcy
Jack Shafer’s “How Condé Nast Is Like General Motors,” in Slate
Although the privately held Condé Nast isn’t as financially distressed as the bankrupt General Motors, and although the magazine business couldn’t be more unlike the car business, the two distraught companies share woes. Both succeeded in segmenting the market with semi-independent [...]

Raft on fire!
Jason Fry’s Reactions to Nieman, Part 2
…the print-centric business model is a burning raft — and when you’re on a burning raft, you have to plan differently.
Ford
Geir Stene’s Media business revenues are dropping so might your Company’s!
The challenges are huge and concern all of us. Rapid changes are hard to handle. I put [...]