The Week: Back to the Future

Amidst the news of the NY Times latest “pay-per-view” scheme the same paper ran a fascinating piece on an upstart newsweekly called The Week that’s meeting surprising, if modest success at a time when periodicals and certainly general newsweeklies are in steep decline.

If you haven’t seen a copy, The Week is a tightly edited digest of what happened in the world the preceding week. It covers hard news, politics, culture and more; mostly by citing, mashing-up, and sometimes excerpting content from other sources. While their model works better in print than online, here’s an example of what they do: What happens if a Japan-sized earthquake hits California?, or this on business news: Is Groupon really worth $25 billion?

Intriguing about The Week is that it is in many ways a reprise of the publishing strategy envisioned by Henry Luce and his original partner Briton Haden for Time magazine in 1923. A story well told in The Publisher by Alan Brinkley.

As access to news and information explode The Week is finding, as Time did in its day, that readers value both the utility and art that sharp editors bring to netting out the stuff they’re interested in.

Digital Textbooks Gain Momentum

An article in the Sunday, August 9th New York Times by Tamar Lewin takes a detailed look at the move to digital textbooks that is gaining traction around the country.

The story quotes Marina Leight from e.Republic's Center for Digital Education and Converge magazine and gives a good overview of developments in the still nascent but probably inevitable move away for traditional text books. This trend got a big shove earlier this summer when Governor Schwarzenegger announced a California initiative to move to digital math and science resources for students.

Not mentioned in the NYT article and worth a look: Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems has been an outspoken champion of free open source educational resources for many years. More recently, Aneesh Chopra, currently U.S. Chief Technology Officer, was working towards a physics digital flexbook in in his previous job as Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Chopra outlined his views on Virginia's digital flexbooks in the video below, filmed in the fall of 2008.

Snapshots From The (Media) Revolution

Whether intentional or not, the Business Day section of each Monday’s New York Times has become a great collection of snapshots on the conflicted landscape of old and new media.

This was especially true this week and is worth a quick review if you missed it:

An article by Ashlee Vance details a new service from Hewlett-Packard called MagCloud which hooks vanity publishing up with cloud computing. The service allows content creators to plug into a network of high speed, high quality digital printers and produce their own short run glossy magazines. Similar technology can also be used for short run book publishing. The Long Tail comes to print.

The MagCloud piece was opposite an item detailing the troubles that may soon see shuttering of the San Francisco Chronicle, which lost 30 percent of its circulation between 2003 – 2008, while another article details how daily papers in Europe are allegedly doing a better job than their U.S. brethren in weathering the internet storm.

Struggling to maintain a hold on eyeballs isn’t just limited to newspapers. Media analyst David Carr has a column on what he calls the “hyperbolic rhythms” of cable news as they try to retain viewership numbers after the flush of November’s TV-friendly election campaign.

Next to Carr’s is a feature entitled “Why Pay For Cable?” which outlines how rapid gains in online viewing of television programming is shifting the ground beneath cable and network TV operators...

where have all my subscribers gone?... Uh, check Hulu and Boxee... (Can we cut a deal with those guys?).

There’s an article by Matt Richtel on how the video game industry (one of the $$$ bright spots of the media world) is under assault from the proliferation of free or low cost games on the web and the explosion of new hand-held devices. “The model as it exists today is dying,” says one video game industry exec.

But wait, there’s more: An article about how Skype, the internet calling service is moving aggressively to bring cheap calls to mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberry. Another on the chatter on how microblogging wonder-site Twitter might monetize and an Associated Press story on a Huffington Post initiative to fund investigative journalism on the nation’s economy. There’s also, a short item on a big deal between Sony and AMC Entertainment to bring digital projectors to movie theaters; this means that movie houses will soon down load movies direct from satellites or the cloud and goodbye film. Such a move has the potential to reshape the traditional movie theater.

Someone said that newspapers are the first draft of history. When it comes to the evolution of the media world NYT's business section has been doing a lively job of late. This is (advertising subsidized) content I would (an do) pay for and would much rather read on newsprint while having breakfast. Keeps crumbs off the keyboard.