Making Sense: News for Print
- The newsonomics of Newsweek’s pricey relaunch. Nieman Journalism Lab: The newest Newsweek strategy is both old-fashioned and radical. It’s old-fashioned in the sense that it is reviving a ghost print brand with printing presses on two continents. It’s radical in its pricing. Even the high-flying, high-quality weekly New Yorker only charges about $79 a year, while Time goes for $30 and The (monthly) Atlantic for about $25. Newsweek is going way beyond those prices.
- The Face Behind Bitcoin. Newsweek: Far from leading to a Tokyo-based whiz kid using the name "Satoshi Nakamoto" as a cipher or pseudonym (a story repeated by everyone from Bitcoin's rabid fans to The New Yorker), the trail followed by Newsweek led to a 64-year-old Japanese-American man whose name really is Satoshi Nakamoto.
UPDATE: The Internet noticed and asked: show your work.
- “I want it to be 25 years ago!” Newsweek’s blown cover story on bitcoin. Jay Rosen: You decided to dig into a subject — bitcoin — about which there is a fairly large and obsessed online community. If you publish on the internet, where it lives, you don’t get to ignore that community anymore, no matter how many creeps, trolls and ignorant fools attack you unfairly and earn your disgust. As Felix Salmon is trying to explain: the very form you chose, the Great Newsmagazine Cover Story Chase, is ill-matched to the knowledge distribution and discussion climate around this subject.
Making Do: Most Practice
- ACCESS DENIED: "Here's Why You're Not Getting That Plum Marketing Job." Marketing Headhunter: The candidate was highly qualified and possessed a fine blend of street smarts and book smarts. He COULD do the job and WOULD do the job for the specified comp and location. Yet his candidacy was DOA. Why? Because the hiring manager couldn't “sell it” to the rest of the organization -- and her explanation was fascinating: During her very thoughtful rejection of the candidate, she asked me the following question ...
- The Best Practice Delusion. Adam Tinworth: The two key players in the transformation remain Jobs and Ive - neither of whom had a formal background in business in any sense [...] the Apple design process is actually lifted from the way satellite or aviation companies work - but complete disregard for the shibboleth of "best practice". It's a company that's confident in its own mission and quite prepared to go to the lengths needed to make that vision come true. Its decision making is swift, and centred. It's the execution from that vision that takes all the time and energy.
Making It: Mobile Perspective
- 20 Highlights From the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Customer Experience Matters: Jared Smith, President, Ticketmaster North America, mentioned that ½ of Ticketmaster’s online traffic and 10% of its sales come from mobile, double the amount from last year. Some additional data shared at the event: 30% of fans are interacting with social media while watching a game and 50% of tweets related to television are about sporting events.
- Facebook Paper Has Forever Changed the Way We Build Mobile Apps. Wired: “Everyone’s jaws just dropped,” remembers Michael Reckhow, who was sitting beside Matas that afternoon. “Everyone started exchanging these glances that were like: ‘What did he just do?’” What’s more remarkable is that Mike Matas is not a software engineer. [...] And yet, in a matter of hours, he could build a prototype that explored photos in a way that surprised even the seasoned engineers who gathered in Chris Cox’s office that afternoon.
+++
Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effects on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.