Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | web 2.0
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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.
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.
March 15, 2006

I get a lot of inquiries about podcasting because DenverPost.com has had podcasts for a year, from newspapers interested in starting podcasts, consulting companies researching them, and from students working on papers. I recently received a note from a student in England, and I thought I'd post his question and my response: