Journalism is in trouble because journals are going away. So are broadcasters that do journalism rather than opinionism. Basically, they are either drowning in digital muck or adapting to it. Also in that muck are a zillion new journalists, born … Continue reading → | Continue reading
How do people get news where you live? How do they remember it? For most of the industrial age, which is still with us, newspapers answered both those questions—and did so better than any other medium or civic institution. Newspapers … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter. — Thomas Jefferson News is the first rough draft of history. — … Continue reading → | Continue reading
From 2007 until about a month ago, I wrote on three blogs that lived at blogs.harvard.edu. There was my personal blog (this one here), ProjectVRM’s blog (also its home page), and Trunkline, a blog about infrastructure that was started by … Continue reading → | Continue reading
So I thought I’d give Bing a try at using ChatGPT to answer a question I had. The question was, “What group sings the theme song to the podcast ‘A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs’?” Bing search took … Continue reading → | Continue reading
I wrote this today for a list that’s mostly populated by folks in overlapping music, broadcasting, legal, tech, and other businesses who share a common interest in what’s happening to the arts and artists they care about in a world … Continue reading → | Continue reading
When I was a kid in the 1950s and early 1960s, AM was the ruling form of radio, and its transmitters were beyond obvious, taking the form of towers hundreds of feet high, sometimes in clusters formed to produce directional … Continue reading → | Continue reading
I’ll be talking shortly to some readers of The Intention Economy who are looking for ways to connect that economy with advertising. (Or so I gather. I’ll know more soon.) What follows is the gist of what I wrote to … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Welcome to my new old blog. My old-old (but not oldest) blog—the one I’ve written since 2007—is still there, in complete archival form, at blogs.harvard.edu/doc, where it has always been. It is now also here with a different URL: doc.searls.com, … Continue reading → | Continue reading
I started this blog in August 2007 after the host for my original blog went away. (That blog has been preserved, however. Find it at http://weblog.searls.com.) At the time I was told something like “Hey, Harvard has been around since … Continue reading → | Continue reading
This blog has been looking like my personal obituary section, and I suppose it is. While I promise to change that, for this post I’ll stick with the theme, and surface some correspondence with an old friend who recommended that … Continue reading → | Continue reading
My email archive contains dozens of postings in which Heather Armstrong* and I are among those writing, receiving, mentioning, mentioned, cc’d or otherwise included. Most postings are from the ’00s and between bloggers in the brief age before media got … Continue reading → | Continue reading
I asked ChatGPT for a three-day itinerary to give visitors to Santa Barbara. Here ya go: Day 1: Start the day with breakfast at the Shoreline Beach Cafe, which has a beautiful view of the ocean. After breakfast, head to … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Her name is Mary Johnson. Born in 1917, the year the U.S. entered WWI, two years before women in the same country got the right to vote, she died in 1944, not long before the end of WWII. She was … Continue reading → | Continue reading