Tachnovation

In traditional media, you are first defined by your medium. (...) There is a cost vs time vs interest vs access series of constraints that determines who your audience is, how you reach them and what they expect of you. Over time, that has evolved our media into very defined roles.

Blogs are different. There really isn't a cost constraint. It costs nothing to create a blog. There are time constraints, but less so than traditional media. Bloggers don't have to publish or show on a schedule. In a nutshell, blogging is personal. Which is really where the paths of blogging and traditonal media diverge. Traditional media has become almost exclusively corporate while blogging remains almost exclusively personal (...)

Which is exactly why blog readership is going up, while traditional media is consolidating, if not contracting. Traditional media goes to work, bloggers live their work.

// posted by Antonio Toca @ 13:31

Q: What will be the pay scale for your editors and writers? Is it comparable to what someone would be paid at a magazine?

Spiers: It depends on the magazine. If you're working for Vogue, probably not. If you're working for the New York Observer, it's going to be higher. It will be like a mid-level newspaper reporter job. And I'll pay more for people who have more reporting experience.

I hesitate to hire mainstream journalists. They always assume that blogging is easy to do. Then they agonize over 100-word blog posts as if they're going to be published in The New Yorker.

There are many really good mainstream journalists who try to blog, but the output just kills them. They'll say, "I can do eight posts a day." Then they'll do three posts and are like, "This took me six hours." It just doesn't behoove me to go looking among mainstream media people for bloggers.

// posted by Antonio Toca @ 02:27

Since ideas can come from anywhere, and can reflect anything, it's hard to categorize and assign responsibilities for good ideas. So in any business, there are good ideas for new products being evaluated by R&D and marketing and product management, and good ideas to improve processes being evaluated by the heads of several functional groups. How do you determine which ideas have the most merit and which to fund? Who is responsible for the succcess or failure of these ideas? Short answer - a lot of different people, who have a lot of other things on their plate. Long answer - really, no one.

// posted by Antonio Toca @ 01:55