The blog of Michael Morisy on technology, news media, journalism, social networking and more, in a new reduced-fat format.
From Capital New York: Traffic is important to Gawker, but it is not its only priority. The site is also interested in developing Kinja—the comment and content management system that its has spent millions of dollars and many years building. The promise and peril of Kinja was…
Interesting move by Pocket: It begins offering a premium service at $44.99 a year with the main new draw being a permanent, cached copy of the content you've saved to read. Somewhat similar to Pinboard's premium Archival account, at $25 a year. These kinds of services have been something…
facebook wouldn't let us promote this story b/c it was somehow vs its sexy-time rules. http://t.co/K70uGyeWcK pic.twitter.com/uwd2fjcZDT— Brian Morrissey (@bmorrissey) May 27, 2014 This is the company that almost every single media companies promotes via Like and Share buttons that…
My Python Unicode Sparkline maker might demonstrably be the worst, but it’s still mine. (And a good look at the many, many problems with this kind of Sparkchart.)…
A look by Frédéric Filloux at digital ad revenue per unique visitor at a few leading online names: The ad market seems to reward quality journalism over aggregation and listicles: The NYTimes.com monetizes itself three times better than Business Insider and nineteen times better than BuzzFeed. For this graph…
Nelson Minar: Scribd’s business model is to host documents in formats that are unusable. For instance, here’s a copy of the Declaration of Independence. Or rather, the free preview; you have to download it to read the rest and a one-day guest pass costs $9. Here’s a…
Rise of “chunked” articles with @SmallPict’s Fargo, @Circa, Sir Trevor (http://t.co/NkZK5Y6jod) & now @qz’s @QZGlass http://t.co/rnMJsN8vmT— Michael Morisy (@morisy) May 12, 2014 So "chunked" articles is decidedly gross, but I am fascinated by the various, interlocked atomization approaches. I left out…
About as much as you'd think. A whole lot, hovering around 50 percent in this analysis and I'd wage mucher higher in my own case: The numbers are higher than I imagined and reflect somewhat depressing news. They show how it’s complicated to think about privacy and autonomy for…
A good if (inadvertently?) depressing read by Danny Crichton: That’s the textbook description of market economics, but the best technology companies rarely follow such a narrative. Instead, they search for ways to create some sort of network or lock-in effect, where they can seize the entire market and hold…
From a wonderful, generally optimistic speech by my old boss Marty Baron: There are serious, unresolved questions about how investigative reporting will be funded, particularly at the local and state level. There are too few journalists providing the most basic coverage of state and local government, as well as their…