Recently in the Business Category
When Google Owns You
Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn't get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn't get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account credentials once worked. When attempting to log in, Nick got a single line message:Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]
That's it.
Nick sent a message or three to Google for support. He got back this:
Thank you for your report. We've completed our investigation. Because our
investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at
this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very
seriously. For this reason, we're unable to reveal any further information
about this account.And that's it.
That's not quite it... apparently Nick had paid for the corporate version of Google Apps, and therefore had access to technical support with a human being, who was able to resolve the problem. But the rest of us don't have that option.
Death in Cyberspace: A Study in Contrast
According to police, Edward Davidson, the "spam king" whose wife helped him break out of a minimum security prison, has killed himself, his wife, and a child yesterday. He was famous for getting rich off of the stupid people who respond to unsolicited bulk e-mail advertisements.
According to various news reports, Randy Pausch, whose "Last Lecture" at Carnegie Mellon University became a YouTube sensation, has run out of time in his battle with pancreatic cancer today. He was famous for giving the rest of us a model for how to face our final days.
The Changing Newsroom
Thanks, Becca, for forwarding this link about how the American newspaper has changed in the past three years. Last semester my journalism students did a unit on community journalism, and they wrote long features that were destined for our new summer-orientation and fall welcome-back issues. So I was aware of some of the changes observed by the Project for Excellence in Journalism's report on the status of today's newspaper, though I didn't know science journalism had taken a hit. Plenty other details to think about, too.
It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and the web. The staff also is under greater pressure, has less institutional memory, less knowledge of the community, of how to gather news and the history of individual beats. There are fewer editors to catch mistakes.
Helping the Almost-Journalists Do Journalism
As traditional news organizations face increasing pressure to cut back on investigative reporting and depend more heavily on celebrity and puff pieces (cheap to produce, attractive to advertisers, accessible to a mass audience), Dan Gillmor suggests that advocacy groups such as the ACLU have an opportunity to fill the gap. If only they were fairer to the opposing view...
They're falling short today in several areas, notably the one that comes hardest to advocates: fairness. This is a broad and somewhat fuzzy word. But it means, in general, that you a) listen hard to people who disagree with you; b) hunt for facts and data that are contrary to your own stand; and c) reflect disagreements and nuances in what you tell the rest of us.Advocacy journalism has a long and honorable history. But the best in this arena have always acknowledged the disagreements and nuances, and they've been fair in reflecting opposing or orthogonal views and ideas.
By doing so, they can strengthen their own arguments in the end. At the very least they are clearer, if not absolutely clear, on the other sides' arguments, however weak. (That's sides, not side; there are almost never only two sides to anything.)
Book editors protest cuts at the Times
Former editors protest and lament the discontinuation of a literary staple:
The dismantling of the Sunday Book Review section and the migration of a few surviving reviews to the Sunday Calendar section represents a historic retreat from the large ambitions which accompanied the birth of the section.
To be sure, no section of any newspaper can remain hostage to past ways of covering the news of the day. We are convinced, however, that the way forward is to increase coverage of our literary culture -- a culture that every day is more vibrant and diverse in the thriving megalopolis of Los Angeles.
Angelenos in growing number are already choosing to cancel their subscriptions to the Sunday Times. The elimination of the Book Review, a philistine blunder that insults the cultural ambition of the city and the region, will only accelerate this process and further wound the long-term fiscal health of the newspaper.
Logged in or out, Facebook is watching you
Researchers at software vendor CA have discovered that social networking site Facebook is able to track the buying habits of its users on affiliated third-party sites even when they are logged out of their account or have opted out of its controversial "Beacon" tracking service.
Ethics in Journalism (New York Times Policy)
B5. Web Pages and Web Logs
126. Web pages and Web logs (the online personal journals known as blogs) present imaginative opportunities for personal expression and exciting new journalism. When created by our staff or published on our Web sites, they also require cautions, magnified by the Web's unlimited reach.
127. Personal journals that appear on our official Web sites are subject to the newsroom's standards of fairness, taste and legal propriety. Nothing may be published under the name of our company or any of our units unless it has gone through an editing or moderating process.
128. If a staff member publishes a personal Web page or blog on a site outside our company's control, the staff member has a duty to make sure that the content is purely that: personal. Staff members who write blogs should generally avoid topics they cover professionally; failure to do so would invite a confusion of roles. No personal Web activity should imply the participation or endorsement of the Times Company or any of its units. No one may post text, audio or video created for a Times Company unit without obtaining appropriate permission.
129. Given the ease of Web searching, even a private journal by a staff member is likely to become associated in the audience's mind with the company's reputation. Thus blogs and Web pages created outside our facilities must nevertheless be temperate in tone, reflecting taste, decency and respect for the dignity and privacy of others. In such a forum, our staff members may chronicle their daily lives and may be irreverent, but should not defame or humiliate others. Their prose may be highly informal, even daring, but not shrill or intolerant. They may include photos or video but not offensive images. They may incorporate reflections on journalism, but they should not divulge private or confidential information obtained through their inside access to our newsroom or our Company.
130. Bloggers may write lively commentary on their preferences in food, music, sports or other avocations, but as journalists they must avoid taking stands on divisive public issues. A staff member's Web page that was outspoken on the abortion issue would violate our policy in exactly the same way as participation in a march or rally on the subject. A blog that takes a political stand is as far out of bounds as a letter to the editor supporting or opposing a candidate. The definition of a divisive public issue will vary from one community to another; in case of doubt, staff members should consult local newsroom management.
131. A staff member's private Web page or blog must be independently produced. It should be free of advertising or sponsorship support from individuals or organizations whose coverage the staff member is likely to provide, prepare or supervise during working hours. Care should be taken in linking to any subject matter that would be off limits on the Web page itself.
On the subject of social networking, what you don't know can hurt you. These networks create opportunities for businesses that would not previously have been conceivable. One avenue to approach is to follow blogs and 'doers' in your industry as well as that of other industries to keep up with the fast-paced environment --E-Magnify
Other, screw-related blog entries:1936: Henry F. Phillips receives patents for a new kind of screw and the new screwdriver needed to make it work. It changes the worlds of mass production and machine repair, not to mention your home toolbox. (Randy Alfred, Wired)
- Unscrewed: Finding Replacement Screws for Palm Tungsten T3
- What is Uni-Screw? - Jerz's Literacy Weblog
- The standardization of screws
Recovering Journalist: NewspapeRx, Revisited
What would you do if you ran a newspaper?
Somebody asked me that question recently, and it made me pull together some of the thoughts I've had recently about the problems that newspapers are having and what they might do to pull out of their current spiral. This is hardly a complete list, but here's a 10-point prescription for ailing newspapers:
1. Make the Web the primary product
Stop pasting the newspaper onto a screen. Reorganize the newsroom so that its work appears online as quickly as possible. Breaking news, enterprise and feature stories should be put on the Web as soon as they're ready. Period. The printed paper should be a snapshot of what's online at 11 pm, and that's about it. Publishing on the Web should drive priorities, not publishing in print. And embrace the technology: news Web sites should be full of Web 2.0 goodness like interactive maps, social networking tools, RSS feeds, distribution to mobile devices, etc. Use the medium to its fullest.
(Full story)
The Burden of the Humanities
The humanities are imprecise by their very nature. But that does not mean they are a form of intellectual finger-painting. The knowledge they convey is not a rough, preliminary substitute for what psychology, chemistry, molecular biology, and physics will eventually resolve with greater finality. They are an accurate reflection of the subject they treat, the most accurate possible. In the long run, we cannot do without them.
But they are not indestructible, and will not be sustainable without active attention from us. The recovery and repair of the humanities--and the restoration of the kind of insight they provide--is an enormous task. Its urgency is only increasing as we move closer to the technologies of a posthuman future, a strange, half-lit frontier in which bioengineering and pharmacology may combine to make all the fearsome transgressions of the past into the iron cages of the future, and leave the human image permanently altered.
The mere fact that there are so many people whose livelihood depends on the humanities, and that the humanities have a certain lingering cultural capital associated with them, and a resultant snob appeal, does not mean that they are necessarily capable of exercising any real cultural authority. This is where the second sense of burden comes in--the humanities as reclamation task. The humanities cannot be saved by massive increases in funding. But they can be saved by men and women who believe in them.
Josh Harris: "Pseudo was a fake company." - Boing Boing
I now acknowledge that Pseudo Programs, Inc., a New York City based Internet television network founded in 1994 and sold from bankruptcy in 2000 was the linchpin of a long form piece of conceptual art. Pseudo burned over $25 million in private and institutional capital over a span of seven years. Pseudo was a fake company.
Papers Facing Worst Year for Ad Revenue
In contrast to the way things are going in the outside world, our print newspaper has been growing steadily since I arrived. The quality of the articles, the physical size of the paper, and the number of issuses per year have all increased. The traditional journalism skills the students learn while producing the print paper translate well into academic studies, but the end result is that they're being prepared for the jobs that are disappearing as journalism continues to move online.For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies.
Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated.
That's not to say that students aren't exposed to new media. They blog in every one of my English/journalism classes, we've had students interning with web CMS and video production, and I teach at least the basics of Flash. But so far, each time I have presented students with the opportunity to expand either the print or the online publication, the momentum has ended up favoring the print side.
I'm hoping to be more active in the online paper this fall, tying more class assignments into the technical and conceptual work that goes into maintaining the online paper, so that the small online staff can focus on innovation and quality improvement, rather than simply duplicating the print paper online.
New media skills continue to be in demand, there's a strong market for editors and technical writers, and journalism is not disappearing. I'm hoping this fall to make the Setonian Online more central to the students' perception of what counts as valuable professional development.
Wish me luck!
The A.P. Asserts Tough (and Still Secret) View of Copyright on Blogs - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog
one key issue is the A.P. wants to protect the headline and first paragraph of its articles. He suggested that this will put The Associated Press in direct conflict with bloggers. "If AP's guidelines end up like the ones they shared with me, we're headed for a Napster-style battle on the issue of fair use," Mr. Cadenhead wrote on his blog.
Although The A.P. wouldn't talk to me, several people I interviewed who have spoken to A.P. executives this week said the organization appears to be internally conflicted and has not yet been able to come up with a clear fair-use position.
But unless something changes, Mr. Cadenhead's experience indicates that The A.P. is going to assert a much stricter interpretation of fair use than most people on the Internet are used to.
News Flash: Bloggers Stop Quoting AP Stories
The AP has a right to discourage people from posting the full content of articles online, just as you or I retain the copyright to our own writing (unless we explicitly give those rights away). But to charge money even for brief quotations is to reject the Section 107 of the Copyright Act -- known as the "Fair Use Exception."
§ 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair useNote that copying an entire book (or song, or movie) in order to avoid purchasing it is not "fair use." Showing a clip from a movie in class, or posting quotations from a novel to back up a review or literary research paper, are all covered by "fair use."
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include--(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Access to the words of public officials, as reported from various news sources, is an important part of the democratic process. A candidate being interviewed on ABC should be able to quote from what an opponent said on NBC, and someone who calls in on a CBS show should be able to quote from what a guest said on CNN. The Fair Use Exception recognizes that anyone engaging in "criticism" or "comment" should have the same the ability to quote brief passages from published materials.
Annoying Multi-part Slideshows
Boston.com has a collection posted under the title "Business Galleries." The advice in one, "Saving for College," is interesting, but the random stock photos of people using laptop computers added exactly nothing to the value of the article, and splitting it across multiple pages is just insulting. I feel exactly the same way when the TV news uses two 15-second "teases" ("Coming up after the break: Are America's children learning enough about what celebrities wear to their parole hearings?") for a 60-second story. TV is about making an emotional impact, and when the news is trivial, you can get more bang for your buck by making the same shocking point three times, rather than putting all that time together to explore the issue in more depth.
Someone must feel that sprinkling tiny nuggets of content across multiple pages is worthwhile, though I'm always angry at the designer for making a deliberate choice that forces me to click, click, click. I have ad-blocking software installed, so I never even see the ads anyway.
I can understand putting one photo per page if the photos are compelling enough to keep the reader clicking through the whole narrative, but come on. I'd rather see a random Flickr image than a generic stock photo.
Disneyworld 08 - Day One
Usually I hate turbulence, but I was too tired to care, and I slept through it like Hicks on the drop down to LV-426.
In the Ebert age of criticism, the Aesthetic of the Hit dominates everything. Behind those panicky articles about critics losing their jobs (what about autoworkers and schoolteachers?), lurks the writers' own fear of falling victim to the same draconian industry rule: Most publishers and editors are only interested in supporting hits in order to reach Hollywood's deep-pocket advertisers. This is what makes traditional criticism seem indefinable and obsolete, leaving web criticism as a ready (but dubious) alternative.
The Internetters who stepped in to fill print publications' void seize a technological opportunity and then confuse it with "democratization"--almost fascistically turning discourse into babble. They don't necessarily bother to learn or think--that's the privilege of graffito-critique. Their proud non-professionalism presumes that other moviegoers want to--or need to--match opinions with other amateurs. That's Kael's "layman" retort made viral. The journalistic buzzword for this water-cooler discourse is "conversation" (as when The Times saluted Ebert's return to newspaper writing as "a chance to pick up on an interrupted conversation"). But today's criticism isn't real conversation; on the Internet it's too solipsistic and autodidactic to be called a heart-to-heart.
FYI: Orson Scott Card Slams J. K. Rowling
The author of the Ender series has some choice words about the author of the Harry Potter series. Note that he's not actually accusing her of stealing his ideas, he's just pointing out how ridiculous he feels her claims are.
Buying Its Way Onto the Program?
Inside Higher Ed reports on Turnitin.com's awkward efforts to get positive coverage at the 4Cs next year. (Via KairosNews, which links to blogger reactions.)
The issue of paying professors to attend the 4C's meeting is particularly sensitive because of the make-up of the association. Many of the people most knowledgeable about teaching composition are adjunct professors or full timers who are off the tenure track and who frequently don't have the same access as tenured professors to travel budgets and research support. As a result, there is arguably more discussion within the 4C's meeting than at some others about issues related to who can afford to attend and present. The conference has a fund to help those without travel budgets attend the meeting -- but applications for such support are not based on whether or not someone favors using Turnitin.com. Kent Williamson, executive director of the National Council of Teachers of English, of which the 4C's is part, said he had never before heard of a company offering to pay people whose papers on selected topics are accepted for the annual meeting. He stressed that Turnitin.com did not ask permission to involve itself with the conference in this way and that the payments it makes are "not in any way a 4C's initiative."I do use Turnitin.com. I can only think of one time when the service identified problems with a paper submitted by a student who wasn't already showing serious signs of trouble in other areas (such as excessive absences or not turning in the pre-writing). I've even had a false positive where a student who had posted her pre-writing on her blog was surprised to find Turnitin.com calling the resulting paper "unoriginal" when it found her blog and compared its contents against the submitted work. Of course I explained to the student I would never even think of taking action on a Turnitin.com report without first investigating thoroughly, but that student was still distressed.
Bedtime stories now available on children's iPods
Nearly a third of children ages 6 to 10 are regular users of digital audio players, according to market research firm the NPD Group. And thanks to entrepreneurs like Katz, they can now use them to listen to bedtime stories.
In March, the Audible.com founder launched AudibleKids.com, where children can download books directly onto their digital audio players.
"I hear lots of people talking, saying that when they put their kids to bed, they put them down with an audiobook," says Audio Publishers Association president Michele Cobb.
Forum Refereee!
The problem with a "what do you think about this", or the hardest portion, is listening to what people say and then waiting until it's all died down to give a summary thanks and move on. Fulop instead begins a conversation and ultimately a quasi-interview/roundtable masquerading as a poll.
A web-based forum (in this case, AtariAge) is no longer imbued with the limitations of bulletin board systems; multiple simultaneous posters are a breeze, images can be embedded into discussions, and the software allows for instantaneous restructuring of the postings to satisfy a linear or threaded regard. While in many ways this is a positive set of innovations, it also brings along with it potential for flamewars and flare-ups to immediately consume the parties involved. There is no waiting period. There is an abundance of meta-discussion due to the non-scarce resource of access. There is a lower barrier to entry with commercial and societal interests in lowering the barrier even further. This is the modern environment and it's the way it is.
So saying that there were an average of 4.4 posts an hour is not all that helpful, in fact; you have no idea of the distribution of the messages. Since people can be writing multiple additions simultaneously, the forum can actually "breathe" in a manner not unlike a bellows or chamber in an engine; with posts queuing up in great numbers and blasting across the message base in waves.
Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Waxy.org
From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" -- a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.
For obvious reasons, I can't share the whole Infocom Drive. But I have to share some of the best parts. It's just too good.
So let's start with the most notorious -- Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For the first time, here's the full story: with never-before-seen design documents, internal emails, and two playable prototypes. Sit back, this might take a while.
How to write 200,000 books, with a computer's help
Parker has generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search on Amazon.com under his publishing company shows, making him, in his own words, "the most published author in the history of the planet." And he makes money doing it.
Among the books published under his name are "The Official Patient's Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea" ($24.95 and 168 pages long); "Stickler Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients and Genome Researchers" ($28.95 for 126 pages); and "The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India" ($495 for 144 pages).
But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Parker a compiler than an author. Parker, who is also the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject -- broad or obscure -- and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.
CBS Said to Consider Use of CNN in Reporting
Over the last decade, CNN has held on-again, off-again talks with both ABC News and CBS News about various joint ventures but during the last several months, talks with CBS have been revived and lately intensified, according to the executives who were granted anonymity because of the confidential nature of the negotiations.
Broadly speaking, the executives described conversations about reducing CBS's newsgathering capacity while keeping its frontline personalities, like Katie Couric, the CBS Evening News anchor, and paying a fee to CNN to buy the cable network's news feeds.
Another possibility, these people said, would be that CBS would keep its correspondents in a certain region but pair them with CNN crews.
Already, newspapers that compete with each other in local coverage use the same wire copy for national or international news. And already, local TV reporters read word-for-word the first few paragraphs of stories from the same wire services. But this is something new.
Slashes in Legal Writing
I'm not a student. I found your web page while looking for a certain use of slashes. I thought maybe you might know something about it.I asked for permission to post this question here. In the The Aspen Handbook for Legal Writers, a section on slashes does not mention the use described here.
In the legal field, we sometimes use slashes to indicate that there is nothing following the text when there is extra space at the end of a page. An example would be when a heading falls at the bottom of the page in a brief. You put in a hard page break to put the heading at the top of the next page, but that leaves a rather large area at the bottom that you don't want some unscrupulous individual to fill with a paragraph that you did not write. It has been common practice to use centered, spaced slashes indicating the text has stopped on this page and will resume on the next page.
My question is, is there a standard as to how many slashes are used and how far apart they should be spaced? And, if there is a rather large empty space, should you place a second set a little further down?/ / / / /
I'm no legal expert, but my legal researcher (a bright 12-year-old named G. Oogle) reveals a case that "held that a virgule ('/'), when placed between two names, is unambiguous and specifically indicates the check is payable in the alternative."
It seems to me that the best thing to do would be to follow whatever conventions you observe in other published writing. If there is a specific rule, I'm not sure what it is or where to look. Certainly there are plenty of legal blogs (blawgs) out there.
In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop
Once you get past that tabloid silliness, you find a thoughtful exploration of the world of bloggers who are paid by the post.
New York Times:
"Wouldn't it be great if we said no blogger or journalist could write a story between 8 p.m. Pacific time and dawn? Then we could all take a break," he added. "But that's never going to happen."
All that competition puts a premium on staying awake. Matt Buchanan, 22, is the right man for the job. He works for clicks for Gizmodo, a popular Gawker Media site that publishes news about gadgets. Mr. Buchanan lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where his bedroom doubles as his office.
He says he sleeps about five hours a night and often does not have time to eat proper meals. But he does stay fueled -- by regularly consuming a protein supplement mixed into coffee.
But make no mistake: Mr. Buchanan, a recent graduate of New York University, loves his job. He said he gets paid to write (he will not say how much) while interacting with readers in a global conversation about the latest and greatest products.
Desire2Learn Patent-Information Blog
Blackboard has been granted a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a TA might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. You wouldn't think something this obvious could even be patented, but so far it's been a very effective weapon for Blackboard, badly hurting Desire2Learn and generating a huge amount of worry for the few remaining commercial LMSs that Blackboard has not already bought, and open source solutions such as Moodle (Blackboard's pledge not to attack such providers notwithstanding)."However, according to Desire2Learn,
On March 25, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued its Non-Final Action on the re-examination of the Blackboard Patent. We are studying the document, found here, but in short, the PTO has rejected all 44 of Blackboard's claims.At a workshop next week at the 4Cs, I'm presenting a half-hour on intellectual property and ethics, in an attempt to get users of off-the-shelf course management tools to think about what it means when they give an outside corporation so much control over the content of their courses. (I'm guilty of this, too, since I use Turnitin.com a lot, so my intention is not to scold but rather raise questions; Mike Edwards will then introduce some open-source alternatives to commercial software.)
The News Business: Out of Print
Philip Meyer, in his book "The Vanishing Newspaper" (2004), predicts that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody's doorstep one day in 2043. It may be unkind to point out that all these parlous trends coincide with the opening, this spring, of the $450-million Newseum, in Washington, D.C., but, more and more, what Bill Keller calls "that lovable old-fashioned bundle of ink and cellulose" is starting to feel like an artifact ready for display under glass.
Taking its place, of course, is the Internet, which is about to pass newspapers as a source of political news for American readers. For young people, and for the most politically engaged, it has already done so. As early as May, 2004, newspapers had become the least preferred source for news among younger people. According to "Abandoning the News," published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper. It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers' stock valuation.



