In my grandfather's day, if you saw it on the front page of the newspaper, it must be true. My, how times have changed! A bizarre story is gripping my city this week, and nobody knows if it's true or if it isn't. The fact that somebody told it to somebody else is news enough! It's almost too bizarre to even begin explaining. Our mayor, Rob Ford, is, to put it in the kindest way, a character. His dislike for the Toronto Star, a major local paper, is legendary and well-established. Their dislike of him is as established. But when they...

Earlier today, O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly announced in a blog post that after seven years of hosting the Tools of Change for Publishing conference, a digital publishing event attended annually by many of the biggest names and most important members of the industry, the conference is being officially retired. Also folding along with the conference is the popular TOC blog, which, like its namesake series of events, is considered a crucial portion of most every digital publishing professional's media diet. The rationale behind the cancellation of Tools of Change seems largely to be one of financial priority. In the aforementioned blog...

I woke up this morning to the news that Kobo is launching a new HD reader! The 'Aura HD' has the same glow technology as the excellent flagship Kobo Glo, but has a bigger 6.8 inch screen with 1440 x 1080 resolution and 265 dpi, which they claim is the highest on the market. It features the same user interface as the Glo as well, with font customization options aplenty, and access to the Kobo store. I think Kobo's strategy is a smart one. They already have the technology developed (for the Glo screen and user interface), so why not deploy it on...

I read a great article today by Matthew Ingram where he explains the current difficulties facing the news media as a 'barbell' problem--entities on either side of the barbell are going to be just fine, he argues. It's the people in the middle who are going to get squeezed! Ingram's theory is this: If you are a top gun, like, say, the New York Times, you'll be fine, because you have both resources to fund new ventures and cash flow to wait it out until you see which of those ventures stick. Similarly, if you are a small-town paper--the other end of the barbell--where "forces...

February 2013 had a cornucopia of Apple lawsuits in all parts of the world, from Australia to Texas to a woman in bed. ♦ The Australian government thinks Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe are charging too much for their products. Now they’ve been summoned to an Australian government inquiry and threatened with legal consequences if they don’t show up. Although Apple did testify in private, they refused to do so in public hearings and that wasn’t good enough. ♦ Although I was irritated when the iPad got updated much faster than expected, suing Apple didn’t cross my mind. That’s not the case in Brazil where the Brazilian Institute...

This post is part of TeleRead's "Using Calibre for E-Book Management" Guide: Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7 | Ch. 8 | Ch. 9 | Ch. 10 We've covered a lot of uses for Calibre so far, including library management, book conversion, and more. But Calibre is more than just an e-book program. Lots of us read more than books, including news and blogs. Did you know Calibre can be set up to automatically download news sources? Here's how it's done: First, fire up Calibre and click the "Fetch News" button.   As you...

One hurdle down. Several more to go with the EU, Canadian Competition Bureau and various other antitrust authorities around the world still needing to weigh in on this. Penguin's settlement with the Justice Department was a move to smooth the way for this merger, and it looks like that move worked. Note that Random House, not included in the price-fixing case, will be bound by the terms of the Penguin settlement. Who owns how much of what? For those who are keeping score, according to the announcement: Following completion, Bertelsmann will own 53% and Pearson 47% of Penguin Random House. It will encompass...

Digiday has a brief piece on beleaguered online magazine Salon. I remember the days, a dozen years or so ago, when Salon was the face of the future of online news media. It had many fascinating feature articles. It was where I first learned about the Palm Pilot, and began my ever-since love affair with e-books and e-reading which ended up bringing me here. I still remember the big to-do around 1998 when Salon broke the story of an affair House Judiciary Committee Henry Hyde with a married woman in the 1960s, as Salon founder/editor David Talbot wanted...

We’ve probably all seen that famous photo of the victorious President Harry S Truman triumphantly holding up a copy of the Chicago Tribune that called the election results for the other side. For decades it has been the exemplar of the hazards of jumping to conclusions, as well as the problems of gathering facts quickly when the speed of communication is limited, But could such a thing happen in the high-speed Internet age? It seems the answer is yes. The Dewey vs. Truman incident happened because at the time the Tribune had to go to press several hours earlier...

On GigaOm, Mathew Ingram posits that the traditional structure of the news article may not be ideally serving today’s readers. Some articles discussing current events may be loaded with terminology that some readers can’t understand—but adding background would waste space from the point of those who know the subject well. In the current on-line era, of course, there are plenty of external sources of information that could be linked—such as Wikipedia, if nothing else—but many papers don’t bother with that sort of linking, and if they did link would rather link internally to their own sources in order to...

Here’s a TechCrunch piece about an interesting new feature that the News.me iPhone newsreading app has just added. The app uses the iPhone’s GPS to know when the user is at his home, and then starts downloading news content in the background whenever he leaves that location. A lot of news apps and sources won’t work when not connected to wifi, but this function will give people on the go something to read while in transit. The article wasn’t very specific about how the downloading function works, but I would assume it uses low-bandwidth mainly-text versions to load...

You might have noticed that many of the stories I write link to blog posts elsewhere, and some even have a “Found via [source]” link at the bottom. This is because it’s a core value of news blogging that if you find a story somewhere else, you link back and so share some of your readers with them—at least in part because if you do, they’re likely to reciprocate and share their readers with you next time. But it seems that the “professional” press continues to have trouble with this idea. On GigaOM, Mathew Ingram looks at a kerfuffle...