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What would a post-print Times look like?January 7

My reaction, whenever I read stuff like this great piece from Michael Hirschorn, is frustratingly simple.

It’s about trading analog dollars for digital pennies. Or, to put it another way, even if we cut out all the overhead of paper and presses and delivery trucks, we can’t pay our existing writers and editors with only our revenue from online ads.

So what’s my reaction? Up your revenue from online ads.

Maybe my reaction’s not that helpful, or maybe it’s a needed slap in the face. A wake-up call.

Newspapers need to be way more imaginative than starting with the assumption that making “a Web-based strategy profitable” must involve the fearsome numbers we see today. If you don’t like today’s numbers, change them. Newspapers need to think about how they can quadruple their online ad revenue per reader.

I believe much of the answer lies in smarter advertising: make it fit the content contextually and make it fit the reader personally. These aren’t new ideas at all. They’re just important to bear in mind because, as worthwhile as Hirschorn’s piece is, it focuses its energy on the editorial side of the operation.

Which isn’t surprising at all, and that’s the point. Even in the best, most insightful posts on the future of news, writers who cut their teeth in a newspaper

The coolest and hardest job in DC: Kagan as SGJanuary 6

Now that she won't be my Dean, I am free to say the following. And I am inspired to say the following by my sense that there's a misperception among some about exactly why Elena Kagan's appointment is so important.

Everyone knows the Solicitor General is the government's path to the Supreme Court. But some write as if the job is about arguing in the Supreme Court. That's a mistake. No doubt, that's a part, though historically the SG has argued a small percentage of the cases (sometimes as low as 1 or 2 a term).

Much more important is the policymaking function of the office. The SG must decide on the strategy for interacting with the Supreme Court. He or she must decide which issues to push, which to hold back, how to frame the issues, and how best to maintain the (deserved) reputation of the office as a principled expositor of the (administration's view of the) law.

Having known Elena since I began teaching (she and I started together at Chicago), I can say that I can't imagine a better choice for this job. Granted, she is not an oral advocate -- though again, that's not the job, and having seen her teach (always at the very top at Harvard and Chicago), I have no doubt she'll be superb as an oral advocate.

But she knows the administration cold (after years in the Clinton administration, and many more years studying and teaching administrative law), and, more importantly (and extremely rare for an academic), she has an extraordinary abilit

The Rolling Stone Of Our TimeJanuary 6

Josh Stylman sent out a tweet yesterday that I agree with:

The Hype Machine is the Rolling Stone of our time - defining, interpreting and pushing culture. http://bit.ly/xuJt

I don't want to belittle what Rolling Stone was in terms of defining and interpreting culture. It's impact was much greater than music. In fact, I think it's political work in the age of Hunter Thompson and Richard Nixon was among its finest moments. And I don't mean to insult Rolling Stone by writing this in the past tense, but honestly it stopped meaning anything to me about 25 years ago.

But in this day and age, when you want to know what's happening in the music scene, you log onto the Hype Machine and see what's going down. It's participatory culture at it's finest. The Hype Machine is not programmed, it's a smart aggregator, like Techmeme or Real Clear Politics. The Hype Machine goes out and crawls the music blogs and figures out what's getting blogged the most and then pulls that together onto a

15 days and Counting…January 5

That’s right – only 15 days until January 20th, which means only 16 days until the submission deadline for ICWSM 2009! Need a reason for going? Take a look at the line up of invited speakers:

• Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University, USA
    Jon Kleinberg is a Professor of computer science at Cornell University. His research focuses on issues at the interface of networks and information, with an emphasis on the social and information networks that underpin the Web and other on-line media. He is a member of National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was a recipient of the 2005 MacArthur "Genius Award".
• Lillian Lee, Cornell University, USA
    Lillian Lee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell. She is well-known for her work in sentiment analysis, and has recently co-authored the book "Opinion mining and sentiment analysis". She has also authored influential work in many other aspects of statistical natural language processing, including in the areas of distributional similarity and natural language generation.
• Duncan Watts, Columbia University, USA and Yahoo! Research
    Duncan J. Watts is a professor of sociology at Columbia University. His research focuses on the structure and evolution of social networks, the origins and consequences of social influence, and the nature
  

Some Thoughts on 2009January 5

So much promise, so many risks. This is how 2009 is shaping up. While euphoria surrounding the Obama Administration's fiscal stimulus plans will drive the markets early in the year, I believe this rally will lose steam as massive deficit spending begins to shine a light on the greatest risk facing the US: debasement of the currency. The power we will be handing our creditors is stunning, and in an unstable and highly politicized environment it may well be wielded to the detriment of the US economy. Can you imagine the prospect of China and Japan balking at buying more dollar-denominated assets? While some might say "Well, it wouldn't be in their (US creditors') own self-interest to precipitate a massive decline in the dollar," depending on the political stakes at hand I wouldn't put it past them. This is a very unstable manner in which to run a country and an economy, where we've lost control of our balance sheet and, potentially, our political standing.

Michael Lewis and David Einhorn penned an insightful Op-Ed in yesterday's New York Times. In effect, they raise several reasons for why the financial crisis happened and what can be done to address the problems. Interestingly, many of their root causes (mis-aligned, short-term Wall Street incentives, rating agencies'