Frank Michael Russell

Media, Innovation and Current Events | A&T, Aereo, Yelp, Zynga

AT&T is changing the definition of “unlimited” for its unlimited data plans, according to a Los Angeles Times story. The company now will slow down data transmission for 3G customers who exceed 3 gigabytes of data a month and for 4G LTE customers after 5GB.

Media, Innovation and Current Events | LinkedIn's 'Freemium' Success; Plus: News Video, a Smaller iPad?

LinkedIn’s fourth-quarter earnings report this week demonstrated the value of a “freemium” model for information businesses. LinkedIn, like other networking websites, has attracted a large number of members — about 150 million, according to the earnings news release — by offering its basic service for free. The Mountain View, Calif., company makes most of its money by selling access to its large, easily targetable audience to employment recruiters and advertisers.

Media, Innovation and Current Events | Facebook, Tech Talent, RIM

One of the biggest stories this week involving technology and media innovation was Facebook’s IPO filing. Startups that want to offer their stock to the public for the first time must file an S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Investors and others closely examine an S-1, which provides the public a first complete look at a company’s financial track record. Facebook’s S-1 revealed that the company has been profitable for the past few years as the number of active users has grown to 845 million. Unsurprisingly, Facebook’s success primarily comes from advertising, which accounted for 85 percent of revenue in 2011.

Media, Innovation and Current Events | Apple, Nintendo, Netflix

This is the first in a weekly series of short posts on media, innovation and current events.

I was fascinated this week by two New York Times stories about Apple’s manufacturing practices in China.  As Apple has expanded its product lines from Mac computers to iPods, iPhones, and iPads, it has moved its manufacturing from the U.S. to China.  According to the Times, President Barack Obama asked then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs what could be done to bring those jobs back to the U.S.  That wasn’t possible, Jobs replied. The U.S. simply doesn’t have the industrial infrastructure, and there aren’t enough U.S. workers with mid-level training (some college, but not necessarily a four-year degree).  Although the articles were framed as related to the political debate over job creation in the U.S., it offers lessons for media innovators about scalability.  As it expands, a growing business needs to be able to find suppliers that can meet its needs.  In today’s world, those suppliers very well may be offshore.

The Internet, What Went Wrong at the Mercury News, and What Now

The San Jose Mercury News, my employer for more than a decade, was an early innovator in online news.  The Mercury News was online before most newspapers established news websites.  In 1993, the Mercury News launched Mercury Center in a partnership with America Online.  Readers paid $9.95 a month for access to AOL and an expanded menu of news content that wasn’t available in the print newspaper.  Just two years later, after the introduction of the Netscape browser, Mercury Center moved to the Internet.

With its technology-savvy readership in Silicon Valley, the Mercury News should have been a leader in the transition from print to digital news.  A lengthy article this month in the Columbia Journalism Review examined why that didn’t happen—identifying mistakes by management at the Mercury News and the newspaper’s former parent company, Knight Ridder. 

Free Expression Online vs. a Free Market?

In the United States, we enjoy fewer government restrictions on our access to information than in many other countries.  While other countries may block online content that contains dissenting political views, Internet users in the United States have a right to freedom of speech  that is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.  However, as much as we value free expression in this country, we also value the free market.

As for the news industry, journalist A.J. Liebling once wrote that freedom of the press is limited to those who own one (Brooks & Pinson, 2009).  The infrastructure for print journalism is expensive.  Over many decades, the local newspaper business evolved from a competitive market with multiple publications in cities throughout the country to a monopolistic market with only one metro daily newspaper in most urban areas.  Today, with online media, it’s much less expensive for individuals or organizations to share news or their views.  In the United States, this occurs for the most part without government interference.  However, significant market forces are barriers to entry for those who wish to start an online publication.

It's Not Just a Copy Desk

This post was first published at the Columbia Missourian's The Transition blog.

It’s not just a copy desk. It’s also a content desk.

One of the strengths of the Missourian’s interactive copy desk is that our editors also have been trained as reporters. They know how to gather information. They know how to write. They understand storytelling.

An Information Revolution?

Yes, we are in an information technology revolution, at least if we define “revolution” as a significant change in our social structure.  The earliest stages of the IT revolution—from the development of the first mainframe computers to the introduction of personal computers in the 1980s—involved only incremental or evolutionary change in how we conducted certain tasks, mostly in the world of work.  However, these changes disrupted lives and livelihoods as automation displaced workers from their jobs.  Our society also adapted an attitude of technological determinism, viewing technology as the solution to social problems and as guiding progress.  For good or bad, our faith in technology put social, political, and economic power in the hands of a highly educated, technologically proficient segment of our population.

The Information Revolution a Decade After the Dot-Com Bust

Silicon Valley was a grim place in 2002, when economist W. Brian Arthur, law professor Lawrence Lessig, and former Intel Chairman Andy Grove gathered at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose for a Business 2.0 Live! discussion, “Is the Information Revolution Dead?”  As moderator Ned Desmond noted, the tech industry in the late 1990s had propelled a frenzied stock-market dot-com boom, which was followed by a just-as-dramatic dot-com bust early in the next decade.  The dot-com bust led to the demise of startups with questionable business models such as WebVan and Pets.com, but it also sharply reduced the market value of profitable, well-managed enterprises such as Cisco Systems.

From Diminishing to Increasing Returns in the Technology and News Industries

In a networked economy driven by technology and the value of knowledge workers, the idea of diminishing returns has been replaced by a new concept—increasing returns.  This change has ramifications for technology companies such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Hewlett-Packard—and for news organizations as they shift from “old” media such as print to “new” media such as websites and editions for mobile devices.