This will be a quick post, but yes, the rumours are true – I’ll be contributing to the technology-business blog “Beep Beep” for The National, along with my colleague Tom Gara. The site is not live yet – it launches on Monday – but I’ll be blogging on a wide range of international and Middle Eastern tech and telecom news and maybe some gadget reviews in the mix. It is something I am really looking forward to and welcome news given that two months ago I was already lamenting my absence from the world of published bylines.
Although I’ve moved to the production side of the newspaper, I still wish to write, whatever and anything I can get my hands on. I’ve already managed to compile a half-dozen bylines in the paper, including my first feature in the weekend magazine on an online romance that went wrong.
Until tomorrow, have a read at some other stories I’ve written for the paper:
I read with much interest a take on how to fix the newspaper industry by my colleague, Jen Gerson. I wanted to respond to it almost immediately but was ultimately dragged away by birthday parties, goodbye parties and what has now become a weekly excursion to Ikea.
Anyways, Jen’s post raises some an interesting idea in the newspaper world and that is to fix it, you must break it up apart and strategically sell sections during certain days to maximize readership and profits. An excerpt:
Why not divide the product up, sell it separately and publish according to readership? So, you maybe have a 10-page, quality news section in tabloid format that comes out daily for free. Your sports is the next big money maker, but your readership and game schedules means it makes sense to publish it only on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, for example. Charge 25 cents for each of those. Sell the arts sections once or twice a week for $1 a pop. Then offer a high quality weekly newsmagazine on weekends that sums up the week’s news and contextualizes in long-form, combined with features. You could charge $1.50 to $5.00 on that alone. Then take your fashion and lifestyle sections, put them into a monthly glossy magazine format and sell them on magazine newsstands at standard magazine rates.
Interesting, no? Could it work? Maybe, but I doubt it. (more…)
I know this blog post is a bit tardy, yet I still want to write about it. As four Swedish men – Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Varg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstroem – now face imprisonment regarding copyright infringement for their involvement behind The Pirate Bay, one would wonder if this will be the beginning of the end for software piracy. It won’t. Ha. Not even close. (more…)
First of all, congratulations should go out to Ashton Kutcher for being the first person to crack the one million follower mark on Twitter. And now that he’s passed that milestone, I’ll happily stop following him.
It must have been a slow news day in the tech world when the biggest news of the day was how Kutcher (@aplusk) surpassed CNN’s Breaking News Twitter account (@cnnbrk) around 10 a.m. Arabic Time. I certainly hope MG Siegler had his cybertonuge firmly in cheek when he described the occasion as, “one of those great achievements in human history.” I originally followed Kutcher about a year ago when I first began using Twitter when I was briefly taken with the fact a celebrity was making himself so accessible to normal folk such as myself. I kept him around when his messages and Qik videos appeared to give a unique insight to his life and I commend his efforts at donating 10,000 malaria nets and some cash if he passed the milestone.
Although the acheivement is a testament the popularity of Twitter, I think this whole situation has been blown considereably out of proportion. (more…)
The following column was originally published in The National in the Business section, April 13, 2009:
Every night, Roy Choi drives his kitchen van around the bustling streets of Los Angeles, stopping frequently to sell gourmet Korean-style meat tacos to a hungry crowd. Instead of relying on print or even word of mouth marketing, Mr Choi publicises his up-to-the-minute whereabouts using Twitter, the micro-blogging phenomenon that permits users to send messages of up to 140 characters to more than 14,000 people.
The result has been remarkable. Instead of struggling to make ends meet in a crowded market, Mr Choi now is greeted by queues wherever he stops. “As a chef, I always think it’s the food. But I think without Twitter it wouldn’t be anything because I could have made these tacos, but I would have had no one to sell them to,” he told the US National Public Radio.
The irony is that while Mr Choi has found a way to cash in on Twitter, the service itself has yet to really reap the financial benefits of its own popularity. It seems to be everywhere. Last year’s “next big thing” was Facebook. But almost overnight, Twitter has usurped its place to become today’s web darling. Celebrities, news organisations, sport superstars and politicians have all flocked to the service in an effort to break down layers of communication to reach people directly. (more…)
It is extremely unlikely that when the guys behind Google flipped the switch to their search engine they would have ever imagined that they would today be pointed as the harbingers of the end of the physical newspaper. Today, that unheard of argument is now a stark reality, with industry leaders from the Associated Press to Rupert Murdoch now bemoaning why they ever decided it was a good idea to let Google troll their content for free.
Some of the outcry is warranted. It feels odd to work for one of the few, if only, industries that produce content that can be acquired free of charge. And I agree that the industry has been slow to adapt to the changing economic and technological climate which has seen companies like Google as well as new ventures like the Huffington Post and NowPublic emerge as valid resources for information. Still, newspapers and news organizations provide a valuable, if not crucial, service to society and one that I hope can find away out of this mess.
The current squabbling over online media has been centred around the link to the content itself and who controls it. Needless to say, it’s a tricky debate given how it’s almost a Catch 22 – without Google or news aggregators like Digg, HuffPo, etc., newspaper websites would see their traffic slow to a trickle but without newspaper websites, there would be no aggregators.
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