dummied

A clarification

At a glance

This entry was written on May 15, 2008.

The entry prior to this is entitled F--- video*.

The entry following this is entitled Finding somebody's Google Reader shared page.

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This entry has been tagged as Newspapers, Recommended, Work.

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My last post might have been a little too bombastic, so allow me to backtrack a bit and get to the actual point (which isn’t video itself, really).

Media companies, especially newspaper companies have yet to master their core competencies when it comes to the internet. We still don’t do text and photos at any level approaching good enough.

Text and photos are what we do. That’s what we, as newspaper companies, produce heaps of every day. That’s the content we need to nail the leverage of before we start moving into other things.

Text and photos are not solved problems … even the best sites (LJWorld, LV Sun, Washington Post, NY Times) don’t nail it, and most don’t even come close.

It’s about treating our text and photos at an atomic level, and allowing our users to find and aggregate what they want, not what we want them to want. Our text and photos are commodities … and anything we do to keep eyeballs from them a) dumb and b) suicidal.

Text and photos can be a solved problem, but they’re not there yet: and we shouldn’t get to play with shiny new toys like video until they are solved.

And that was the real point.