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

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 [...]

1996 Honda
Jim Barnett’s Why NYT Co. might not be as quick to sell the Globe as you might think at Nieman Journalism Lab
The Globe does cost a lot more than my Honda to operate. But the really big bucks — the $1.1 billion purchase price — is money long since spent. Just like the cost [...]

Last Ship Afloat and Colonial Williamsburg
Bill Keller, The New York Times‘ executive editor, and Jason Jones in The Daily Show’s “End Times”
Keller: It’s always been one of the higher asperations in the business to work for The New York Times. Nowadays, we’re a little bit like the last ship afloat. So we have all these [...]

Ralph Gross remembered the glory days of The Des Moines Register and he didn’t like what it had become.
“Thirty years ago,” he wrote in a 2005 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, “I would pass in front of the Register building and with great pride read a display that said: ‘The Des Moines Register has won [...]