Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | new media
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December 5, 2008

National Public radio I'm an off-and-on supporter of National Public Radio, I admit it. I'm a fair-weather donor to NPR, depending on how much I'm tuning in. There have been periods when I commute with the car when I listen to NPR a lot, and then there are times when I ride the bus to work and I pass the time with my iPod set to shuffle. Lately, I've been driving to work more, thanks to a parking space in the building that's too inviting not to take advantage. So, I've been listening to "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered" more again. During the run-up to the election, I was a complete news junkie, and also tuned in at the office, streaming my local NPR station, KCFR's news programming all day via the Web. So when the most recent pledge drive came around in October, I was easily enticed to give more support than I ever have. Instead of the minimum of $50 that I'd usually donate, I committed $120 on my credit card just so I could get the premium they offered for that level of support: A Radio Bookmark. The Radio Bookmark allows me to save stories on NPR to hear them again later. It lets me leave the car instead of sitting in the driveway or a parking lot (or, in some cases, on the shoulder of the road), riveted to my seat and listening until the end of a fascinating report.
August 14, 2008

Check out the widget above. What’s a widget? Widgets are cool, portable little online features that you can put onto websites easily by just copying a little bit of code into your page. I'm helping to get the word out about The Denver Post's widget for coverage of the Democratic National Convention, coming up in a little over a week here in Denver. It’s a simple way for sites to include syndicated content from outside sources, contained within a defined box or space. Think of all the different elements on a MyYahoo or iGoogle home page – those individual boxes of content are all widgets on the page.
June 23, 2008

Leave it to a former rockcrit -- and a McClatchy employee (the company just cut 10% of its workforce nationally) -- to come up with an eloquent essay on the decline of the newspaper industry and the ascension of the Internet. Online people, myself included, have been saying for years that the Web should be first in news priority, and that journalists shouldn't think that they work for newsPAPER companies, but instead NEWS companies. Maybe, coming from an august writer like Leonard Pitts, a world-class columnist at the Miami Herald, this idea will start to sink in with those of you who still have ink in your veins. He sounds like speeches and conversations I heard going on a decade ago, but better late than never, I say:
We still tend to regard our websites as ancillary to our primary mission of producing newspapers. But I submit that our primary mission is to report and comment upon the news and that it is the newspaper itself that has become ancillary. So maybe we should regard the Internet not as an extra thing we do, but as the core thing we do.
April 20, 2008

"Time-shifting" is a new media term for the ability of technology to allow us to consume media -- whether it's video or music or text -- at any time. The most obvious example is people recording TV shows on the DVRs to watch later, at their leisure. You can hear a teleseminar via podcast any time after the fact (for instance, on a plane flight to SF, which is when I listened to a class on my iPod). And this morning, I've been both time- and PLACE-shifting, by listening to an archival re-broadcast of Casey Kasem's "American Top 40" radio show, which was originally broadcast on April 14, 1973. It's kind of spooky because it's very possible I was listening to Casey Kasem's affable voice that Sunday morning, and yet here I am, "tuned in" to hear the show all over again, in a San Francisco hotel room but hearing a stream from Denver oldies radio station KOOL105. All I need is the newscasts and commercials of the time, and I'm a 15-year-old kid all over again.
April 9, 2008

As a card-carrying baby boomer (I guess officially, with my AARP membership!), I was 10 when most of 1968 happened. It was a pivotal year, no doubt -- though in my consciousness, '69 left a deeper impact. AARP magazine does a fine job of using the Web as a story-telling device to revisit the year. This online special section kicks...

January 13, 2007

Newspapers come and the news is gone the next day. TV reports are even briefer. Magazines tell their stories week by week, or month by month, and then they're forgotten. But content on the Internet has a more persistent life cycle. Now, content can live forever -- or at least, a lot longer than it used to. And, in our current information age, content of all types can prosper even if it lies in the eddies and swirls along the edges instead of the mainstream of pop culture. Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired magazine, wrote an entire book (and blog) about this phenomenon, called The Long Tail. Here's his theory, in a nutshell:
The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.
This idea of the Long Tail perfectly describes my experience with an online tribute page I created for my friend Alan Dumas, who died suddenly of a heart attack in April 1999.
September 6, 2006

Oswald being shot, photo by Bob JacksonI'm watching "JFK: Breaking the News," a documentary on WNET, one of the New York area's PBS stations, about the media coverage of the November, 1963 assassination of president John F. Kennedy. It's fascinating because in analyzing the way both print and broadcast journalists scrambled in Dallas after the shooting, the program shows how it was a bellwether event in the history of media. It marked the passing of the "breaking news" mantle from newspapers to television.