I've had an object lesson this week in the perils of newer, easier information-sharing, via two news articles which came my way through different means. The first was a write-up in the local paper featuring a colleague of mine who had decorated her house in celebration of the Maple Leaf's glorious but ultimately short-lived playoff victories. The Beloved saw the picture, recognized her name and tore out the page to bring it home for me. The second story was a write-up at Techdirt by Timothy Geigner about a 'bug' in a recent Nintendo release which allowed Sims-like characters to marry same-sex...

I wrote previously about Star Dispatches, an e-book subscription service being produced by the Toronto Star. According to this article on The Star's website, they're being recognized for this series with two Online Media Awards. The service has an intriguing set-up where, for a nominal fee, subscribers get a new e-book sent to them every week. There is no à la carte purchase, but the weekly fee is so affordable that subscriber retention has been high. From the admittedly self-congratulatory write-up: "We’re extremely proud of the stories being told in our weekly eRead format, our subscribers are highly satisfied and the business model has...

* Editor's Note: The end of this post contains a minor House of Cards spoiler. Photographer Will Steacy has a photo essay on his online portfolio called 'Deadline;' I've seen it pop up on several blogs this past week. In the essay, Steacy memorializes the newsroom of the Philadelphia Inquirer, from their first buyout in 2009 through their move from the iconic 'Tower of Truth' office tower and into a single-floor office at the top of an old department store. Some of the photos, such as the before-and-after of the old newsroom—full of desks and phones and people, and then an empty shell—are...

What's Next for eBooks and Libraries? (Digital Book World) Digital Newspapers Growing in Popularity, Local Papers Need to Follow Suit (Good e-Reader) Amazon-Goodreads Acquisition Killed an Apple Partnership (The Digital Reader) How Indie Authors Can Work Together (GalleyCat) Kindle Daily Deals: The Right Hand by Derek Haas (and 3 others) ...

Media Shift has a great write-up of the Toronto Star's new monthly e-book subscription, called Star Dispatches. I know I've mentioned the Star's e-book experiment before, but this particular article goes into a lot of detail about how the series was created, and how its unique subscription feature works. From the article: Sandy MacLeod, vice president of consumer marketing at the Toronto Star, said their market research showed it took an "incredible amount of marketing" to produce single-copy e-books that generally sold 100 to 300 downloads at $4.99 each. The math just didn't work out to make a viable business case, he...

My mom is a pack rat, which as everyone knows can be frustrating for friends and family trying to help bring order to accumulation. The upside of pack rattery is there are always gems scattered among the detritus of domesticity, and so it was last week, when I discovered at her house a box full of old newspapers originally saved for their historic headlines. There, in yellow newsprint, was the moon landing, Nixon's and Agnew's resignations and the 1972 Arab-Israeli war. And Senator Robert F. Kennedy's assassination: Two papers from June 6, 1968—one, the morning New York Times, with a headline proclaiming...

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...

Ebooks: Newspapers should capitalize on their archives (The Guardian) Bookstore browsing vital for publishing, research finds (The Bookseller) Are African writers and readers ready for the e-book revolution? (The Creative Penn) Short Books + Fast Books (and Diet) = Indie Success (Publishing Perspectives) Kindle Daily Deals: Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut (and 3 others)...

A daily Japanese newspaper, the Tokyo Shimbun, has recently launched an app that allows children to scan specially-marked articles with their smartphone, which then reveals various kid-friendly content related to the article. An anime character, for instance, might pop up on a child's smartphone screen and explain the article in kid-friendly terms. Various graphics and pop-up headlines may also be revealed. The app, AR News, was developed by a Japanese firm known as Dentsu, which was contracted to create a solution that would make newspapers, and newspaper reading, more enjoyable to children. To use the app, a child simply has to find an...

I’m glad I paid extra for the upgrade to unlimited free popcorn refills. Techdirt and Ars Technica are reporting on the continuing saga of Righthaven’s “Schroedinger’s CEO” Steve Gibson and his attempt to hire more lawyers to continue litigating one of the cases the copyright troll infamously lost. The Techdirt piece largely covers Gibson’s tortured arguments that the court-appointed receiver, Lara Pearson, lacks the authority to fire him. The reasoning seems to boil down to a bunch of legalese about the nature of limited liability companies. Gibson insists he does have the right to hire additional lawyers to argue...

Under pressure from News Corp’s upper management, Rupert Murdoch has lately agreed to divide News Corp up into two corporations—one that contains the corporation’s entertainment assets, and the other to contain its newspaper and publishing assets—including “Big Six”/”Agency Five” publisher HarperCollins. Murdoch will remain in charge of both new companies. Attempting to put the best spin on it he could, Murdoch said the split would “create the most ambitious, well-capitalized and highly motivated publishing company in the world, consisting of the largest collection of our news and publishing brands, as well as our groundbreaking digital education group”. ...

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...