Tuesday, January 09, 2007

"There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening"

"Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view - the witless repetitive response to the unperceived"

"Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories - for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result" Marshall McLuhan

Michael Wolff
writes about the dead tree gang in his latest VF piece, Billionaires and Broadsheets...

"This was the cosmic joke: newspapers, once the singular province of big men, great sons of bitches, monsters, Citizen Kane himself—the Tribune was run by one of the most outsize of news barons, Colonel Robert McCormick, grandson of a Chicago mayor, co-founder of one of the nation's biggest law firms, isolationist, militarist, show-off, star of the first newsreel, avid and odd personal crusader (spelling reform was one of his hot issues)—had become the land of nobodies."

"Newspapers may be absolutely ending, but people within an industry, any industry—and these billionaires, accustomed to being written about, are as much involved with newspapers as the people writing about them—are the last to be able to see its absolute end. (Whereas for people outside the industry, especially outside the newspaper industry, especially among the growing majority who don't read a paper at all, the end seems to be almost inconsequential.) It's impossible to believe that something that defines your life, something that exists as big as life—like, say, an American car—will just cease to be. (This kind of denial is one of the things that make industrial decline such a glacial process.)"

Bravo Michael, well done. Reminds me of Wolff's earlier writings. Read the entire article here.

Dave Winer offers another fine piece in today's post...

"Moral of the story: If you're big, or aspire to be big, cover all the bets you can, and never assume your lack of support will hurt your competitor. Get in bed with the guy whose lunch you want to eat." Kudos Dave, good stuff! Read Dave's entire post, Microsoft used to be smarter, here.

When the kids are away the dinosaurs come out to play: Tom Teuber, Rick Murphy, Jonathan Little, and Dave Benson will take over student radio station WSUM today beginning at 3pm central. Well worth the bandwidth. Have fun guys. Check out the stream here

Bravo to Kodak! Cheers to my former colleague Steve Tom, excellent performance Steve! Having a sense of humor about one's self and about your company is one of the secrets of success. As has often been said "this is not a life saving hospital, we are not looking for a cure for cancer, it's only a television station." This is must-see video. They're gonna turn the schmaltz back up to eleven, oh YES


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