media

From The Membership Guide’s handbook/manifesto:

Journalism is facing both a trust crisis and a sustainability crisis. Membership answers to both.

It is a social contract between a news organization and its members in which members give their time, money, energy, expertise, and connections to support a cause that they believe in. In exchange, the news organization offers transparency and opportunities to meaningfully contribute to both the sustainability and impact of the organization.

Elsewhere it continues:

Membership is not subscription by another name, nor a brand campaign that can be toggled on and off.

…and:

Memberful routines are workflows that connect audience members to journalism and the people producing it. Routines are the basis for a strong membership strategy. Notice that audience members are specified here, which is likely a wider group than your members.

On the future of media, at The Awl:

Of course a website’s fortunes can change overnight. That these fortunes are tied to the whims of a very small group of very large companies, whose interests are only somewhat aligned with those of publishers, however, is sort of new. The publishing opportunity may be bigger today than it’s ever been but the publisher’s role is less glamorous: When did the best sites on the internet, giant and small alike, become anonymous subcontractors to tech companies that operate on entirely different scales? This is new psychological territory, working for publishers within publishers within publishers. The ones at the top barely know you exist! Anyway, internet people, remember this day in five years: It could happen to you, whether you asked for it or not.

Because, on the future of MetaFilter:

Unfortunately in the last couple years we have seen our Google ranking fall precipitously for unexplained reasons, and the corresponding drop in ad revenue means that the future of the site has come into question.

Ironically, from a Facebook executive:

Please allow me to rant for a moment about the state of the media.

I was wondering when somebody was going to do what html5media does:

HTML5 video tags make embedding videos into documents as easy as embedding an image. All it takes is a single

html5media is a JavaScript library that enables

New 160GB AppleTV. How far away are we from a standalone unit that can download from iTunes store directly, sync iPods, and write to USB-attached burners?

What Liberal Media author Eric Alterman arrested, mocked at GOP debates.

Somebody at Gizmodo found this Agence France-Presse story about the intersection of American surfing and bathroom habits in The Hindustan Times. It’s based on a report by the USC Annenberg School‘s Center for the Digital Future. For five years running now, the center has tracked internet use (and non-use) in a 2,000 household representative sample of America (choosing a new sample each year).

This year, researchers found: “Over half of those who used Wi-fi had used it in the bathroom.”

Gizmodo is going a little farther than I’d initially care to by asking readers to comment on their behavior, but I found this gem that reminds us that this may just reflect the evolution of our media: “The laptop in the john is the new newspaper for the millennium.”

I apparently have too many neatnik issues to go down that path, but rather than devolve the discussion, I’d like to point out that this Center for the Digital Future report appears to be a good complement to OCLC’s latest report and the regular stream of reports from the Pew Internet Project.

Now back to the funny: RSStroom Reader.

Via an IM from Ryan Eby: a pointer to Andrew Escobar‘s directions on how to install Apple’s Front Row.

James Torio has been working on his masters in marketing and took a strong look at blogs for his thesis.

I looked at how Blogs have impacted business and communication, how some Blogs create revenue, how some companies are using Blogs, how Blogs greatly boost the spread of information, how Blogs add richness to the media landscape, how Blogs work in the Long Tail, how some companies are tracking the Blogosphere and what the future of Blogging may be.

Via Blogging Pro

Wendy Seltzer alerts us to the Delaware Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Cahill v. Doe, a case that tested our rights to anonymity online, as well as the standard for judging defamation.

As it turns out, the court decided against the plaintiff, a city councilman, and protected the identity of “Proud Citizen,” who the councilman accused of posting defamatory remarks in an online forum. Further, it also decided that the context of the remarks “a chatroom filled with invective and personal opinion” are “not a source of facts or data upon which a reasonable person would rely.”

In short, as Seltzer points out, the ruling hold readers responsible for seeing materials in the context they’re presented in:

The standard empowers a wide range of bloggers’ speech. Because readers can use context to help them differentiate opinions from statements of fact, bloggers are freer to publish their choice of opinionated gossip or citizen journalism. And thanks to courts like Cahill and Dendrite, they can do so using pseudonyms or their real names.

On the Media’s recent show on November 29th and a piece in All Things Considered explored the relationship between technology and pornography. This is familiar territory for some—Wired magazine reports on it regularly…

Click the links above and listen for yourself.