Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
The Logo ·
Jul 1, 2010 at 3:29pm
A special edition of the podcast this week. Ink and newsprint are giving way to iPads and Tweets. James Lileks (lileks.com and Minneapolis Star-Tribune), Tucker Carlson (DailyCaller.com), and Bill McGurn (The Wall Street Journal) join us to discuss where the print news business is heading and how we'll be accessing information in the future. Discuss or ask questions for any of the podcasters here.
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Jun '10
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
Peter says, "people will pay for an identity or sense of community." Spot on. Ricochet is like an NRO cruise for impoverished conservatives.
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
˜Paules, that is our business model exactly!
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
Yes, but without the drinking. Oh, wait...
Jun '10
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
I'm part of your business model? For real? Dude, you can't be serious! I live alone with a cat. I don't have a television. My ultimate fantasy is to star in a conservative version of Harold and Maud featuring myself and Florence King.
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
Okay, well, keep that part to yourself, ˜Paules. We have investors to impress.
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
You're a pretty funny guy, ~Paules. Glad to have you around the joint.
May '10
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
Ricochet is effectively replacing Facebook for me in terms of time I spend online. I still like being connected to longtime friends and acquaintances but the conversations are just better (and more civil) over here.
Jun '10
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
I can offer you one suggestion to improve this site. Hire Bill Whittle. He's America's best essayist, and he will bring in exactly the type of customers you are looking for. There was a time when E3! was active that his essays would draw sometimes up to 500 comments.
Jun '10
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
Is the IPad really the future? When Peter interviewed Rupert Murdoch on UncKnowledge and Rupert was talking up the IPad and saying how it would be so wonderful, I recall thinking to myself, "really?" I just kind of thought of it as some other piece of crap 'they' were trying to get us to buy. But you guys seem totally on board with it.
I see the Pad alot like mp3's in that they limit media and news to the priviledged who can afford them. I'm not trying to go all class warfare-y on you here, but, and IPad for a couple hundred bucks or a newspaper for 25 cents.... an I Pod for 250 dollars for less quality music... the whole system seems like a rip off.....man. (I have to throw in the 'man' if I'm going hippie).
Eh, I'll just stick to Drudge for now, it's 'free' but you have to sift through the stories about women witih 48 cats or global warming conferences canceled due to snow.
May '10
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
In the Internet age traditional media is stuck with a model that retains all of its disadvantages but none of its advantages. People would complain about news organizations but couldn't do anything about it because the means of production and distribution were cost prohibitive. Now, technology has leveled the field. Any one can publish, any one can shoot and edit video and it all comes down the same wire and displays on the same platform as the big boys. Plus Google and YouTube have replaced the other traditional advantages such as the newspaper morgue and the network/station videotape library.
But there is something else more sinister in all of this. For decades, Liberal America has pushed for the nationalization of all of our problems and now, instead of solving things locally, all eyes turn to Washington, DC. It has become the default setting. That makes more and more people disinterested in things local and local is the great strength of newspapers and terrestrial broadcasting.
Jun '10
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
I am starting to see the (slight) advantages of bundling that cable, etc. affords. Everyone has this new business model that only $9.99/month...until you add them all up and cringe. I really like PJTV and Ricochet and Hulu and OpinionJournal...A la carte is expensive.
Cable only cost $40-60/month, sure it was mostly junk, but look at all of the junk you got!
Where did MicroPayments ever go? I could set my media consumption limit at $30/month and then pay 10 cents per article and 25 cents per video and then pick and choose what I wanted to read about.
May '10
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
Bill McGurn suggested that Rob is actually a virtual reality entity. I guess that leads to the ultimate question...is he a benign "Rob Headroom", or bent on doing evil as "Lawnmower Rob"?
May '10
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
I posted a question in the last podcast conversation and was wondering if our questions get to the contributors, like VDH, who aren't as active on Ricochet?? Could there be a forum just for questions for the contributors that is always actively checked?? I always seem to be two or three days behind everyone and the last comment left on every thread. I was starting to think I carried some curse and was the kiss of death for a conversation. But, now I think I'm just that last slow marathon runner and the finish line markers keep getting packed away. No, no, wait for me...
If you could just give me next week's podcast now I wouldn't have this problem.
May '10
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
Wordcooper says, "Cable only cost $40-60/month, sure it was mostly junk, but look at all of the junk you got!"
Want to watch the liberal MSM crumble (faster)? Try the phrase, "À la carte." Nielsen Media says that Americans pay for an average of 150 channels of television but only watch about 10% of that. If the FCC mandated that consumers should only be forced to pay for what they choose to consume, within six months MSNBC, LOGO, Current and several dozen other channels would cease to exist.
May '10
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
The panel this week is right, people won't pay for crap, whether it's print crap, or e-crap.
I'd still be subscribing to the Chicago Tribune if it wasn't crap.
As I tell the guys who try to give away copies in the supermarket "Keep it, I wouldn't paper train a dog on the Trib."
And if prospective readers won't wipe their dog's behind with the local paper, it's unlikely they're going to pay for it however it's delivered.
May '10
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
I got my front teeth knocked out on my honeymoon. White water rafting in Australia. So, three minutes into this week's Ricochet podcast I now understand my husband's comment..."Why do you want to get off the river...when we lost a tooth in baseball we just spit it out and finished the game." I burned a path out of that river and to the local dentist and left tracks across my husband. In case this is a guy thing...missing teeth and scars may be battle wounds for men, but they don't work on women. Now, back to my elliptical before my five minute time-out ends. Geez, is workout blogging the equivalent of ~Paules' whisky blogging?
May '10
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
I like Tucker's unlikableness; the irascible persona works for me. That said, I find Daily Caller too rude. Case in point: the stupid photo feature making fun of Elena Kagan's appearance (Elena Kagan as Fred Flinston, as Nathan Lane, etc.) really debases the conversation and regardless of how popular it is, should be an embarrassment to anyone attached to the site.
May '10
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
What's nice with my St. Louis Business Journal (in print form) is that I scan the headlines and rip out the articles I want to read, stuff the folded pages in my bag and away I go. The articles on the online news sites aren't as portable. If I pull them up later the front page has changed and I dig around to find the earlier articles. On a dinky iPhone it's too frustrating. Thank you, Ricochet, for the "follow this conversation" button, so I can mark it and move on. It would be nice to be able to drag and drop articles from the different news sites into a folder that I could later read on whichever new gadget I'm supposed to buy. Or, at least have the ability to flag them within a given site. The closest solution I have found is to e-mail the articles to myself.
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
Andrea - We're planning on significantly revamping the Conversations I'm Following and People I'm Following features to make them more usable. There are at least three problems that we're trying to solve: (1) making it easier for people to know at a glance when there's been activity on a conversation they've visited; (2) keeping interesting conversations from scrolling into oblivion; and (3) archiving conversations for future reference. The thoughts you've shared have definitely helped shape our direction, and we'll be rolling out new features in the upcoming weeks and months. (We're also working on member-initiated conversations, but that's a separate work stream.)
May '10
Re: Ricochet Podcast #23: Read All About It
That's great! I like that titles of contributor posts show up on my Facebook news feed, now, and I can just click on it. Also, some of the fun comments you make on Facebook about what's going on at the website will make me go check it when I otherwise would have waited until later.
I know this is more software writing for the website, but I wonder if there's a way to have some of the comments reveal somehow (like in a pop-up bubble when you put your cursor over an article??). So, you can scan the main feed page and get just a little more information without having to go into each conversation. Sometimes the comments will have an interesting twist that might draw other people. I mean, who knew a topic about the war in Afghanistan would offer such entertainment.