Comments by Steve Goodman

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Agreed totally on the long term energy thing - we need diversified energy sources. That's just common sense. I guess what I'm getting at is: are oil and coal dangerous, if CO2 emissions aren't really a global issue? I'm asking here - I have no idea.

In our thinking, we need to balance long term with short term. In the short term, there seems to be a hefty political movement to charge the hell out of oil and coal based on CO2 emissions. I'm speaking specifically of carbon credits, which I need to research more. While the brunt of that cost is born by all US citizens, the hardest hit are people who can't afford a big swing in the costs of every day living. When a bill swells 30% in a year, people who are maxed out already simply can't swing another 30%.

So if the situation is not actually all that dire, we need to take a more graded approach than these sudden cost shocks which are springing up through the US economy.

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Tinfoil hat refers to conspiracy theory in general. The origin is something along the lines of "Aliens are zapping my brain with gamma rays from the core of the earth, so I'm wearing a tinfoil hat to protect myself."

The link I posted yesterday really makes me want to re-watch An Inconvenient Truth, so I can cast a slightly more skeptical eye on the presentation.

Cheap energy really is an incredible gift to humanity, so if it's not nearly as destructive to the planets ecosystem as it has been made out to be, I feel that story needs to be told.

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Time for my semi-regular troll comment :)

Since stumbling onto the Peak Oil apocalypse site a while back, I felt compelled to due more research on green energy, global warming, oil production, etc.

My stumbling, much like your stumbling, has lead me to another site, also dubiously designed, also with numbers, that questions the validity of human-caused global warming: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_da...

I'm officially turning my tinfoil hat inside out, rally cap style.

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Congrats! That's the old alma mater, there - I hope you get them pointed in a good direction.

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That's a good point Gus, especially in the context of transitioning. You have to be a realist about the present state of affairs to create a workable plan for where you want to go.

I'm curious, could you point me to an example story that has driven massive traffic to the Sun?

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Pardon my ignorance, but what is the value/goal of an insert over a traditional ad on a page in the magazine? Is it just more exposure for the advertiser's current sales?

I think the key is what you're stressing: being the preeminent local news organization.

That's what you need to define your strategy around, because that's what you are. That's the value - quality news! Distribution models are just ... distribution models. Don't let the tail wag the dog.

With the above as a caveat, I think your strawman has a good amount of heft to it.

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This goes a way towards confirming my thesis that print is for depth of information; for reading. Trying to make print more like the web by USA Today-ing it displeases older readers, but it may very well "capture" casual readers. When I worked in DC, most people on the 8:30am metro were reading Express, which has the depth of a puddle, but a lot of coverage of TV, celebrities and fashion - but that was 2003 - 2006.

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Exactly! Save your best stuff for print, and people will look forward to it. You can't offer all your content online and in print every day, and expect print to have much demand. But if you put your talented reporters on a story, and give them time to discover something truly substantive, I think you've got something special.

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Print is great for:
- long term information
- long form information

Long term information is useful (how do I do something?) and is frequently referenced. It makes a strong candidate for print because you might want it next to you while working to clarify your next step - printed recipes in the kitchen is a good example.

Information that is detailed, and tells a complex, interwoven story is a good candidate for print. It's hard to read 40 pages of info on screen, let alone a 500 page novel. Also, you can finish reading a stroy and get a sense of closure on print. Online, there's always a million more links to click and explore. Obviously, books continue to sell well despite the digital revolution, though we'll see if Kindle or next gen readers change that game.

For the newspaper business, I'd think that day to day coverage of local/regional/national/intl stories could phase completely into digital. Investigative work, interviews or anything else that is more than just reporting would seem like a natural fit for weekly print distribution, like the New York Times Magazine.

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It's going to be an interesting ride for traditional ad/creative agencies as online ads become a larger and larger part of advertiser's budgets, while the actual value any given ad view plummets (http://www.darrenherman.com/2008/11/04/issues-w...). I think that we will see publishers become the drivers of creative ad formats, as publishing channels are no longer scarce compared to the number of advertisers.

Publishers are going to have to offer a lot more value to advertisers to compete for advertising dollars, so video, large format (like pandora) and proprietary, yet-to-be-dreamed-of ad formats will be produced for an advertiser by the publisher, to leverage all that knowledge the publishers have about their audience.

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I think Conley’s sentence

“And since inequality rises exponentially the higher you climb the economic ladder, the better off you are in absolute terms, the more relatively deprived you may feel”

is the key to this phenomena.

Do you do things because they satisfy you, or do you do things so you can stack up socially? Competition never ends, so unless you love the competition, you’re going to be stressed. It’s better to find a different game to play.

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While I think it's an interesting idea, I also think it's an idea that's about 5 years too late to implement successfully as a profitable operation. Omnipresent network access got a whole lot closer to an every day fact of life with the release of the iPhone.

As Michael Smith said, there are going to be significant start up costs for rolling this out in any widespread manner, and I'd say within 24 months from now, there will be 30+ million iPhones in the US alone. I think the number of people who read the physical paper is going to dwindle pretty rapidly to traditionalists who like reading paper more than a screen, as many will be able to read the Sun online while commuting.

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thanks for the great slides! The presentation is a great starting point for learning more security techniques and following the community more closely.

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I agree with darrel that this is a semantics issue. Does ‘new’ mean ‘new within the last 30 years’ or ‘new since the history of time’? It depends on who you ask. As with most words, there’s a whole network of personal context hidden behind the word itself.

It’s certainly possible to be successful, effective and different by standing still; we just have to be careful not conflate those concepts with being innovative. Retrovative on the other hand…

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