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Cody Brown

A Public Can Talk To Itself: Why The Future of News is Actually Pretty ClearOctober 25 2009

Nothing will replace newspaper companies or what they do. For the past few months an un-holy alliance has consumed the media nerds on Twitter as two traditional foes have attempted to etch the above idea into stone. For those who make (or used to make) a living in the newspaper industry, the idea is at the crux of nearly every editorial and is used as an argument to support micro payments, government funding, an illegal form of price fixing, and, you know, vice. For those outside the industry, the biggest rallying cry came from NYU professor Clay Shirky. He calls it the ‘great unbundling’ and asserts that there will never be another competitor to The New York Times; its pieces will be atomized and continue to spin into products like 538 and Craigslist

Shirky provides an

MySpace is to Facebook as Twitter is to ______August 6 2009

The past few weeks have come with two major reveals for the weirdos who follow online social networks. The first was big news. Twitter’s internal documents leaked and the identity-crisis of earth’s most popular start-up is now public. The second was more under the radar but just as important. In a memo that went out to staff, the CEO of MySpace admitted that their users are caught between three competing notions of what MySpace is or should be.

Twitter and Myspace are different companies in different markets but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that they share, and will always share, the exact same problem. MySpace and Twitter are hugely popular for uses neither company anticipated. The mission of each company is so vague that their products are stretched and molded into a variety of different uses. Instead of targeting and building their business around one of these users they take their sudden popularity as a sign they have a killer product. They don’t.

Scale is Everything

When an industry is in transition or an idea like ‘social networking’ is still being fleshed out, ge

Batch vs. Real Time Processing, Print vs. Online Journalism: Why the Best Web News Brands Will Never Look Like The New York TimesJune 9 2009

It has been a long time coming but the NYT’s and the uber popular silicon valley blog, Tech Crunch, finally smashed into one another. This weekend’s Sunday Times came with a trend piece in the Business section on how big tech blogs (like Gizmodo and TC) publish ‘groundless’ rumors for hits. Many considered it to be a kind of hatchet job directed at the site and for the past few days it triggered a sprawling controversy where everyone from Jeff Jarvis to Charles Author weighed in.

The analysis arrived at a pretty classic conclusion,  Tech Crunch Vs. NYT is really an example of David Vs. Goliath  where one isn’t following the rules that the other is making. This is the case (and if you haven’t read the Gladwell piece, you must) but  there is a more helpful way to think about what is happening. It comes  down to this:  print news sources and web news sources are made for entirely different types of information processing, print works best in batch and online works best i