Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute appeared on The Daily Show Monday, February 9th, to discuss his recent cover article in Time Magazine about ways to save the dying newspaper industry.  During his interview with Jon Stewart, he talks about how he’d like to see on-line versions of newspapers charge for articles in a manner similar to the way iTunes charges for songs.  While I don’t condone piracy or copytheft of any kind, I do have two words for Mr. Isaacson: COPY, PASTE

Why do I feel like he’s dug up a dead horse?  Barriers to entry for illegal filesharing are minimal at best these days; but circumventing news subscription services is an absolute piece of cake!  I can’t think of a single time I have come across an article hiding behind a subscription service, usually mentioned in a forum at a news aggregator like Digg or Fark, where someone didn’t simply copy and paste the content to the forum or other venue for everyone else to see.

Stewart astutely posits the idea of news aggregators, Read more…

Though we exist in a time of great media upheaval, where the Internet has made available so much story for so little effort, millions are still drawn to long-form traditional narratives. We still go to the cinema, the bookstore, the concert, the play, the big game, the event. Though so much power can be packed into a media snack – a tweet, a blog post, a text message, a sentence, a word, or even an acronym (LMAO anyone?) – we still sit down for super-sized media meals. Something must be inspiring us to pull up that chair and sup from the old media table. Inspiration seems to be the answer. What is the importance of inspiration to storytelling? In our digital world – full of bombardment from massive narrative abstraction and fragmentation, where so much story content is being communicated in so many bits and bytes and packets like bullets from a fiber-optic Gatling gun – we still find time to stick the old media morphine drip in. This happens when we do something so archaic as watch an hour-long drama on network television, spend nine innings at the baseball stadium, or, gasp, read an entire Harry Potter book cover-to-cover. Read more…