I wonder how inadequate – or doomed – our institutions are today in the face of new and disruptive technologies, including – to echo Allen – profound new means of measuring behaviour (which upends, for example, advertising, not to mention tracking government performance through its data). It’s that kind of question that gets me in the most trouble with people I’ll call institutionalists, who defend legacy institutions – journalism, media gatekeepers, the academy, government, et al – against the disruption I sometimes welcome.

via PSFK: http://www.psfk.com/2012/04/jeff-jarvis-the-institutional-revolution.html#ixzz1rxMgorK7

That each may be looking to buy a leading newspaper isn’t a surprise, as neither company has the consumer scale to attract the advertising that would diversify its revenue base. Peter Gardiner, partner and chief media officer at Deutsch, says that withBusinessweek, Bloomberg has “done a great job of taking an incredibly boring product and making it more Bloomberg-y,” while Bloomberg Markets, the monthly magazine distributed primarily to terminal subscribers, is a “hidden jewel.” At the same time, Bloomberg TV has a problem in that it is “not as distributed and easy to find as CNBC,” Gardiner adds.

As for Reuters, it still must figure out how to combine its legacy businesses and differentiate its news product. Like Bloomberg, it hasn’t easily grown its consumer footprint. Reuters’ original YouTube channel has been slow to take off versus the products of other established media, achieving 7,383 subscribers and 893,759 views since its Jan. 17 launch.

“It’s complicated, because you’re serving multiple customer groups,” Adler concedes. “The areas we need to work on most are enterprise and commentary—the thoughtful, insightful piece that explains where everything is heading. But this, right now, is an extremely viable model.” (In a dig at Bloomberg, Adler notes that Reuters’ $300 million in non-subscriber revenue, while small, happens to be “much larger than Businessweek.”)

Bloomberg’s mission to become the most influential news organization is evidenced by the extreme confidence of its top brass. “Every year, we get to be more indispensible,” says Winkler. “Whether we are the sole provider of news to a community … I think that remains to be seen. But every year, we get deeper and broader.”

Tom Reller, an Elsevier spokesperson, told The Scientist that the company still opposes rigid government mandates regarding science publishing but hopes that withdrawing support of the RWA will quell some of the complaints the company had heard. “We don’t necessarily think this is going to end the boycott or anything,” he said, “but hopefully this helps everything calm down a little bit so we can get back to having a dialogue with funding bodies, both nonprofit and government.”

But some boycotters aren’t changing their positions based on Elsevier’s latest move. University of North Carolina theoretical biology PhD student Joel Adamson said that the company’s decision was welcomed, but that it didn’t go far enough to deter his support for the boycott. “Within the realm of those kinds of solutions, it is a good thing, but it still doesn’t go all the way toward what I would call a real solution to the problem,” he said. “It shows me that they are a predictable corporation; in other words that they’re capable of being scared that something might affect their profits.” Adamson added that if Elsevier would abandon “bundling practices,” in which the company allegedly groups desirable science journals with less-august titles in package deals for university libraries, it would go further towards changing his mind.

Excluding all membership based subscriptions, (including AAA Living and American Legion Magazine), Better Homes and Gardens tops the list, with 22.2 million subscribers, down slightly from 2010. BHG claims a monthly readership of 38.33 million readers, 30.28 million of whom are women.

There is likely very little crossover in demographics between BHG and #4 on the list, Game Informer, says the report, covering the interactive gaming market. Publisher Sunrise Publications offers no insight into its demographics (which presumably reflects those of gamers, being largely male and under 30).

Still, single-copy sales were down 9.96% during the period, which Media Life called the “steepest slide in the last four reporting periods.” Single-copy sales across 408 consumer titles dropped from 32,118,948 in the latter half of 2011 to 28,919,153. They were down 9.15% during the first half of 2011, and down 7.27% in latter 2010.

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/168696/magazine-circulation-suffered-in-2011.html#ixzz1nhKEhmJe

And yet: Digital First, at this reading, has about 1,000 bloggers within its cities, compared to Patch’s 14,000.

Then there’s the overlap question: Aren’t these guys doing the same thing? Well, sorta, kinda. Buttry even says Digital First could reach out to Patch, offering a partnership or aggregation arrangement of some kind, though he hasn’t done that yet. “We should include them in our local networks.”

So it’s not David vs. Goliath, nor David vs. David, nor Goliath vs. Goliath. In fact, these may be two Davids both fighting against the Goliaths of Facebook and Google, which are rapidly gaining digital ad market share on everybody. It’s just another front in the digital wars, one perilously close to our homes.

Cory Doctorow at Chaos Computing Meeing

The Coming War on General Purpose Computation – Boing Boing.

And here is an article that reminds us of how what Richard Stallman said in the past, which was often written off as paranoid, might actually have been prescient.

This is what Stallman has been warning us about all these years – and most of us, including myself, never really took him seriously. However, as the world changes, the importance of the ability to check what the code in your devices is doing – by someone else in case you lack the skills – becomes increasingly apparent. If we lose the ability to check what our own computers are doing, we’re boned.

That’s the very core of the Free Software Foundation‘s and Stallman’s beliefs: that proprietary software takes control away from the user, which can lead to disastrous consequences, especially now that we rely on computers for virtually everything we do. The fact that Stallman foresaw this almost three decades ago is remarkable, and vindicates his activism. It justifies 30 years of Free Software Foundation.

Starkman doesn’t just criticize us (though he does that, at length.) He also puts forward a Burkean defense of institutional tradition as a store of embedded wisdom, arguing for the continued relevance of existing news organizations, especially newspapers, in something very close to their current form.

He jokingly calls his vision the “Neo-Institutional Hub-and-Spoke Model.” His description of what’s needed, though — “rebuilding or shoring up institutions” — makes it clear he doesn’t need the “Neo-” bit. He is talking about somehow saving the familiar institutions, not inventing new ones, a strategy that has long passed for Plan A in the conversation about what the internet changes about the news business.

Comics via a pre-paid model.

via Kids’ Nets Face the Mystery of Missing Children | MediaWorks – Advertising Age.

copyright law is public law—enacted by Congress, enforced where appropriate by the President, and interpreted and applied by the courts—there is plenty of opportunity to monitor the effects of the law and to debate the ways in which it should be reformed.

Increasingly, however, copyright law is being privatized. Its meaning and application are determined not by governmental actors but by private parties, and in particular by deep-pocketed copyright owners. Increasingly, the balance between private rights and public interests is set by private lawmaking.