Poynter has an interesting article, looking at The Daily Show as being a leader in media criticism, an area where it does an excellent job, even if that's not its intention. But, what struck me most of all in the description of the team behind the show, was that it has a full-time researcher and fact-checker, who looks for multiple sources to verify the content that they're using in the show. Now, in a typical news room, this shouldn't be surprising. But, instead, we've actually seen the opposite. Fewer and fewer news operations have full-time fact checkers (or fact-checkers at all). Yet, here we're talking about a comedy program, whose main job is to make people laugh, and it employs a fact-checker who verifies points with multiple sources. Full story...
And I thought Ed Whitacre had moved on to run United States General Motors. You may recall that, half a decade ago, when Whitacre was running SBC (prior to its takeover of AT&T), he made sure that a lot more people heard the term "net neutrality," after he claimed that SBC should charge Google and other big online companies.
Everyone makes mistakes sometimes, but we keep hearing how it's the professional press that actually checks fact, and it's the blogs that rush out stories that are factually weak.
While we keep presenting details of CwF+RtB working for various musicians, big, medium and small, some have complained that there needs to be more data to demonstrate that these kinds of business models can work.
Copyright insanity continues. Stephan Kinsella posts an email from Luke Mroz, who recently attended a Comedy Central taping of some standup comics, that is going to be used in an upcoming TV show.
Is it any wonder that NBC Universal keeps having trouble? If you painted them a map that explained how to clearly provide people what they wanted, the company would do the exact opposite.
We've already pointed out how director/writer/filmmaker/entertainer Kevin Smith is a great example of a filmmaker embracing the model of connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy, even to the point of saying that unauthorized file sharing is just a way to get more fans he can "convert.
We've seen this before, with individual authors like Paulo Coelho and David Pogue, who both found that as more people were able to get unauthorized copies of their ebooks, their sales actually increased.
A bunch of folks sent over Jeff Jarvis' recent blog post entitled stop selling scarcity, which I actually think is slightly misleading.
In my experience, there is a group of photographers who are even more extreme in their copyright views than groups like the RIAA and MPAA.
With a new report coming out suggesting that Facebook sends more traffic to news sites than Google News, folks like Mathew Ingram are asking if Rupert Murdoch, the AP and others will be complaining about Facebook "stealing" their traffic and demanding to get paid.