I must say I enjoyed Felix Salmon's ungentle fisking of Henry Blodget re how to save the New York Times even though I am not persuaded by--nor can I follow--every bit of it. But hey, this is still a blog entry, and they don't have to make 100 percent sense now do they? I certainly endorse the idea that you can't treat the newsroom as a theatre for Taylorite efficiency studies. It takes me back to my time in the city room: at some point, some thimble-head sent in a time-and-motion guy whose job was to ask three minutes what the reporters were doing right now: evidently they thought the solution to the problem was to get us to type faster. But a larger issue that they missed, and that Blodget missed, is that a newspaper city room profits from a certain amount of ludic horseplay: it keeps people motivated and alert, and it serves as a great forum for the transmission of ideas (I assume that something like the same philosophy is at work in the loosey goosey management style said to reign at Google). Indeed, if there is a problem with city rooms right now it may be that the new technology has cut down on just the sort of interaction that made the old-fashioned city room thrive.
Still, I think Felix dances around the core economic problem: newspaper readers never paid for content, they paid for paper and ink and delivery; advertisers paid for content. And until somebody figures out how to bring them back into the game (or finds a substitute) the downward spiral will continue.
A final poiint: Felix likes his physical newspaper at the breakfast table, and on the train. News: the New York Times and the Financial Times were offering promotional freebies just this morning-at Kindle, for download. The FT, by he way, is priced actually higher on Kindle than the lowest available street price: evidently they are figuring that somebody (globetrotters?) will be wooed by the allure of instant-anywhere.
[For people who get their fingers greasy at the table, Kindle also offers an "automatic page turner option." I leave it to the reader to decide whether this a design feature or a ludicrous misadventure--haven't used it myself, and doubt that I will.]
Update: Thedeal.com has a nice wrapup on the general blogosphere debate.
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