A week or so ago the Philadelphia Inquirer provided news industry observers the opportunity to beat their breasts and exclaim, “We get it, you don’t!” This is a popular thing to do, but in this case it was a tempest in a teapot.

The much quoted Inquirer memo said in part:

Beginning today, we are adopting

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David Brooks has a great op-ed in Today’s New York Times titled, “Lord of the Memes.” It’s ostensibly a guide to pseudo-intellectualism, but hits on what may be the key to media companies’ travails. The money quote:

But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release

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In another sky is falling article in MediaWeek, Anne Gordon, former managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and now with Dubilier & Co., makes the interesting assertion that,

the strategy of large regional papers to serve the whole of their sprawling markets with local news sections has been a bust. Instead, papers should leverage their depth

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Last Spring the Havas Media Lab published a paper on user generated content. Actually, the firm rejected that term and determined that “consumers aren’t creating content:they’re creating context for goods.”
First, what connected consumers create isn’t junk elongating analready Long Tail of content. Rather, from an economic point of view,user generated context is

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