As long as the newspaper was a bundle, no one ever had to care that people were buying it for radically different reasons. But once you go online, and people can unbundle things, where you can traffic directly to a story without going through the home page or any of the rest of it, suddenly what it — the individual choices made by individual readers come to matter a lot.
– Clay Shirky, on NPR’s Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan
News Byte
Liz Gannes in News on November 28, 2011 at 4:00 am PT
Historian Richard Rhodes wants to make sure Hedy Lamarr stays famous for more than just her looks. His new biography of the actress, out Tuesday, highlights her lesser-known scientific and intellectual side. In 1941, Lamarr was co-inventor of a “spread-spectrum radio” system, designed to better guide World War II torpedos while evading detection by randomly switching frequencies; it wasn’t used at the time, but became a precedent for modern wireless communications. Here’s an interview with Rhodes, from NPR.
News Byte
Ina Fried in Media on October 2, 2011 at 2:34 pm PT
National Public Radio on Sunday tapped Gary Knell, the longtime CEO of Sesame Workshop, as its next chief executive.
Knell, who starts Dec. 1, fills a post formerly held by Vivian Schiller, who resigned in March.
Peter Kafka in Media on June 1, 2011 at 10:11 am PT
Former National Public Radio head Vivian Schiller, who left her last job under a political cloud, looks to have found a new position. She’s in talks to work at NBC News, where she’ll oversee digital projects.
Kara Swisher in News on March 9, 2011 at 10:21 am PT
Today, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller resigned after a series of borks–including a sting video in which the public radio’s top fundraiser insulted the Tea Party activists and the fumbled firing of commentator Juan Williams.
Oh dear.
Well, the former New York Times exec was pretty good at moving NPR into the digital age, at least.
“Can you put food on the table with music? Probably not. I see music as a really great hobby for most people in five or 10 years. I see everybody I know, some of them really important artists, studying how to do other jobs.”
– Cake lead singer John McCrea talking to NPR, via Digital Music News. Showroom of Compassion, Cake’s most recent release, is the lowest-selling number-one album of all time.
Kara Swisher in News on February 8, 2011 at 12:23 am PT
Here is my appearance yesterday on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” where I pontificate about AOL’s $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post.
My take: News is the winner!
Which is
just what I’d say.
Liz Gannes in Social on January 18, 2011 at 1:03 am PT
On Friday I was a guest on “Science Friday” to talk about my experience with and observations about the proliferation of online social networking identities and options.
Kara Swisher in News on October 29, 2010 at 12:44 pm PT
Today, BoomTown interviewed AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, along with NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, at the Online News Association Conference in Washington, D.C., about the future of journalism on the Web.
Afterward, I talked to him about the future of content on AOL, most particularly its new homepage revamp that focuses intently on editorial “curation,” rather than the more social direction being taken by rival Yahoo.
After the jump is a screenshot of the new homepage, which is rolling out right now.
Kara Swisher in News on October 21, 2010 at 1:18 am PT
Here’s a radio interview BoomTown did earlier this week on San Francisco’s KQED “Forum” show, hosted by Michael Krasny.
The topic was a report in the The Wall Street Journal that certain third-party apps on Facebook were grabbing information about users in ways that violated the social networking site’s privacy guidelines.
