Rational Rants

June 24th, 2009

Amazon on the record: Device limits set by publishers

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 5:30 pm

Categories: Business & Technology

Tags:

I queried Russ Grandinetti, vice president, Books, at Amazon about the lack of clarity about how many devices can access a Kindle book or how many times a buyer can expect to download a title from the Kindle Store. He referred me to Drew Herdener, director of communication at Amazon, who replied with the following:

Russ forwarded me your note. Thanks for your interest. To answer your question, there is no limit on the number of times a book can be downloaded to a registered device (i.e. Kindle, Kindle DX, iPhone). In the case where the publisher has chosen to apply DRM, there may be limits on the number of devices that can simultaneously use a single book. If a customer has upgraded or replaced their device(s), they can delete the content and deregister any device(s) no longer in use, which enables the customer to download to new registered devices.

So, to reduce the answer to its component parts:

• Buyers may download an unlimited number of copies of a Kindle book title they have purchased to a registered Kindle device or iPhone (and, future supported devices) that are associated with the buyer’s Amazon account,
• unless a publisher has decided to impose a limit on the number of devices that may simultaneously have access to the title,
• in which case, the user may go to their Manage My Kindle page and “deregister” a device to allow for downloading to a device that does not currently have an access to the book.

Publishers, not Amazon, make these decisions. Customers need information about device limits when buying, it should be displayed on the product page as a courtesy to customers. I still believe setting a higher limit than six is essential to making a book useful to a family.

I have asked Drew several follow-up questions and hope to have a bit more soon on how customers can identify books with limits and whether there is a system-wide default limit on number of devices.

A usability note based on this information: The Manage My Kindle page does not list either the number of devices on which a title may be accessed, nor the devices on which the title is currently is readable. Both would be helpful information, the latter because it should be possible to deactivate a device’s access to a single title without wiping out the device’s library—this is doubly important because only some of the titles in the Kindle Store come with simultaneous device limits.

I may want to make a book accessible to my son’s iPhone, for example, which would be the seventh registered Kindle device in our household, by taking it off my daughter’s Kindle. If I disable all the titles on my daughter’s Kindle by deregistering it, she’d be pretty disappointed, when all she wanted to do was share a book with her brother (not that she’d be in the mood to do that very often).

My roughly hewn mock-up of what this should look like in the Manage My Kindle library is displayed to the right. There is ample room in the Your Orders listings for a book to include a device listing that allowed per-device registration of the title. By checking the red box, one could deactivate the title on just one device, in this case “Dad’s Kindle.”

Without per-device control of titles, the system effectively limits the number of devices a customer can use conveniently to the lowest number of devices on which they may want to read a DRM-limited title. That needs to change. And it is good that Amazon is listening.

Cross-posted from Booksahead.com

June 15th, 2009

The future of the book, expanding

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 3:38 pm

Categories: Business & Technology

Tags: E-reader, Mitch Ratcliffe

I’ve posted a couple excerpts from the book I am working on, about the future of books and reading. It’s a different topic than Rational Rants’ mandate, and with so much news and opinion every day to comment on, deserving of its own place and community. So, without further adieu, I introduce you to BooksAhead.com, where today’s comments include topics as diverse as Blackberry e-reader applications, color e-readers, Kindle DX and the meaning of spoken word rights when e-readers can read aloud.

Keeping up with news about the future of publishing is a full-time job. I’ll also be reproducing e-book and publishing-related articles from Digital Media: A Seybold Report, which I edited way back when, when e-books were only eight years old (which is longer ago than you think).

June 9th, 2009

Bad Idea Dept.: AT&T's Ed Whitacre to run General Motors

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 10:46 pm

Categories: Business & Technology, Social & Political

Tags: Board, Industry, AT&T Corp., General Motors Corp., Whitacre, Whiteacre, Corporate Governance, Strategy, Business Operations, Corporate Law

Ed Whitacre, who built SBC, one of the babies Bell, back into “The New AT&T” has been tapped by the Obama Administration’s auto task force to be chairman of the “reinvented General Motors.”

Seriously. Think about that.

AT&T is the template for the future of the American automotive industry.

This may be the worst business decision ever. It will surely come back to haunt the Obama team. AT&T is monolithic and has grown increasingly less innovative since the 1990s. Whitacre has only confirmed his indifference toward customers with repeated decisions on privacy, net neutrality and executive compensation that defied a commitment to delivering the best service at a reasonable price.

As an example of an egregious lack of corporate fiscal discipline, his $158 million retirement package from AT&T, which included country club memberships, makes plain that Whitacre is the wrong leader for GM’s business today.

At AT&T, Whitacre led a company that under-performed compared to its industry and the S&P 500 during his term as CEO. AT&T shares are trading in the same range today as they did earlier this decade, before Whitacre took over, and in the 1990s. Today, the company trades for 67 percent of its enterprise value.

All those strategic merges that Whitacre’s supporters tout have not paid off.

AT&T, a company Whitacre said is “all about scale and scope,” which was rebuilt largely on limiting customer choice, is not what Detroit needs. What the automotive industry needs is innovation and streamlining of every aspect of its logistical and manufacturing systems, in addition to a healthy dose of transparency. Those are not Whitacre’s strengths. From deals to that rebuilt most of Ma Bell, reducing local competition in many regions of the United States, to locking sales of Apple’s iPhone to the AT&T network—as well as the generally lousy quality of AT&T service—he has emphasized big and unresponsive as the basis of his business. Whitacre has subdued more innovation than he’s enabled, relying on his ability to bully regulators on behalf of AT&T, which he insisted was under attack from all sides. In his home state, Texas, Whitacre’s companies, SBC and AT&T, have consistently attacked public wireless initiatives, trying to prevent them from operating through legislation instead of trying to compete with or enhance those services.

Additionally, Whitacre fought shareholders seeking to limit his compensation throughout his years at AT&T, ultimately being forced by the SEC to allow a shareholder vote on a watered-down board proposal.

I ask you, again: Is this the right model for a revived GM? Instead, it’s is a fairly complete description of the dying GM.

Whiteacre is an engineer who has built his reputation and wealth through leveraged buyouts of companies, always paying a premium price and, ultimately, paying the cost with a poor stock performance compared to other telecommunications companies. Forbes called him “tall, smart, driven, and sturdy as a telephone pole.” He obviously does have a high estimation of himself, and the clout to get board members to go along with his self-assessment. His pay rose dramatically while he slashed more than 30,000 jobs at AT&T. This pole looks unconnected to economic reality from any angle.

Because the government owns the majority of GM, each of us should have our say about it. This is my two cents. Appointing Whitacre on the recommendation of a hold-over GM board member is not a smart move by the Obama team. They wanted outside perspectives on the automotive industry, but hired the ultimate insider regardless of what industry he’s in.

In fact, this is a decision the courts probably should review, because of the public investment involved. Informed shareholders should not buy off on Ed Whitacre running General Motors. Let’s see some real breaking of boundaries, not an executive shuffle based on insider connections.

Correction: Thanks to reader Jim Gillan for pointing out that I misquoted Forbes, writing “seasoned as a phone pole.” The corrected quote, “sturdy as a phone pole,” is now in the story.

June 2nd, 2009

Google begins its rumble with Amazon

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 11:57 am

Categories: Business & Technology

Tags: Search Engine Optimization, Google Inc., E-books, Personal Technology, Mitch Ratcliffe

Amazon has some new competition for the hearts and minds of book publishers and readers, which is a very good thing. But the news that Google is poised to enter the downloadable bookselling market is of mixed value to readers and publishers, because we’re headed into a format/delivery model war that will wipe out the value of many millions of books people purchase over the next year.

Google is talking about a “digital book ecosystem,” which is essentially a closed system that depends on authentication of users, caching of limited numbers of HTML books on a device, and a security regime that probably will discourage any deep linking or social features for the time being. Google’s current book downloads, consisting of about 500,000 out-of-copyright and a few tens of thousands of copyrighted books available only in “limited preview” and “snippet” sample forms, uses a “My Library” approach to collecting books and providing repeated access access to them. Books downloaded from Google Books are presented in PDF format, different than the reported formats discussed by Google this week.

Think the music subscription approach that Microsoft takes with Zune Pass, where ongoing access to the service is required if you are going to keep using your library. One of the primary benefits of the Kindle, at least for people I’ve talked with, is the ability to access their books locally rather than over the Net. For all the proprietary issues Kindle-formatted books have, they do the one thing readers want well: make e-books useful anywhere. The same is true of books downloaded onto various mobile phone and PC platforms.

Moreover, the Google service will apparently rely on some form of authenticated HTML access to books purchased, rather than the PDF format it currently uses for downloadable books in Google Books. Not the ePUB format, which the entire industry should be adopting (and adapting, because it needs work, too), nor any of the downloadable formats, such as .MOBI or other formats compatible with the popular Stanza reader from Lexcycle, now a subsidiary of Amazon. Adoption may not rely on downloading a new reader, since Google’s service will reportedly work in a browser, but so many people have installed these other readers that there will be some perceived migration cost among users.

The battle may take the form of a price war, though I think it will not end until e-book data is standardized enough to work across hardware and software platforms is over. That means that after the shake-out is over, most of the e-books purchased by now and during the e-book wars will likely be obsolete and unreadable sometime in the future. Compared to books, which are infinitely useful, that’s a big step down. And for publishers, who will likely face readers’ wrath without Google’s help, that’s a reason to think twice before doing a deal that allows Google some input on pricing.

Accounts vary as to whether Google will set prices or whether publishers will—I tend to believe the publishers will have control of prices for the most part, as the private briefing Google held with publishers during BookExpo America this week would have turned into a bloodbath if they’d tried to dictate prices, as Amazon has.

I’d only point back to my recent posting on the curation of e-books being a significant value-added service as a way of advising publishers to think twice before moving forward. Facilitating social connection through books is an extremely viable way to support profits. The privacy concerns raised by Richard Koman are also a concern, though I don’t think Google will display ads in the books it sells. It will, however, harvest more personal data from book usage.

All in all, the field is only being set for a showdown, one that is going to produce upheaval in publishing (a good thing) and a lot of wasted spending by readers (which is a bad thing).

April 27th, 2009

Books: Entering the Age of Glosses

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 7:20 pm

Categories: Business & Technology

Tags: Movie, Audible Inc., Cryptography, Books, Copy, Kindle, Master File, Page Number, E-books, Digital Security

Here’s the key to thinking about the future of writing, something straight out of the manuscript era: the humble gloss or “scholia,” for those who prefer the Latin. They are the notes, in margins, footnotes at the bottom of a page (the standard starting around 1700) and later in the history of books endnotes at the back of the volume or in a separate appendix, that add interpretations, background information, commentary and definitions. Creating marginalia is an art made for the era of “crowdsourcing.”

Steven Johnson’s essay in The Wall Street Journal last week, about his e-book “‘aha’ moment” describes a number of new forms for the book. A worthwhile read. Johnson focuses on the unit of consumption, including the possible bundling of chapters of different books to facilitate sampling and the potential for a “global book club” about any word or sentence within a book, not just a focus on the whole book.

I think the deep change that will change what we think of as reading and “the book” will be the end of the idea of the finished book. It was only in the 18th century, when binders stopped adding extra pages for notes in the books they produced for individual customers and standardized binding, that writing in books became a taboo (despite many notable rebels against that trend), and before that using notes in books was a widely recognized form of social communication, according to author H.J. Jackson’s Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books.

Last fall, I started researching the future of books and am now working on a book about the future of books, because a market research report about e-books would miss the real challenge faced by authors and publishers, along with their readers: How to see past the ideas we have about the artifact we call a “book.” After the jump, I’ll share an excerpt from the book that summarizes why cryptographic features, which could easily be tossed out with DRM, are the source of one of the most important potential reservoirs of value for publishers in The Age of Glosses, when readers share ideas through books and the idea of a finished document is not obsolete, but is increasingly rare. Read the rest of this entry »

April 17th, 2009

It's all downhill for Twitter, politics from here

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 3:15 pm

Categories: Social & Political

Tags: Oprah Winfrey, Twitter, Taxes, Free Trade, Personal Finance, Financial Planning, Finance, Mitch Ratcliffe

This week, “tax protesters” gathered across America to dump bagged tea into symbolic bodies of non-potable water and Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN to a Twitter follower showdown. I admire anyone who takes to the streets for their ideas and recognize the power of media, even when it is lowered to the level of counting masses of followers. Oprah followed me today. I have no idea why she did, other than to get followers, and that demonstrates a profound lack of understanding about social media.

First, the “teabaggers.” These folks are protesting taxes in the nation with the lowest taxes in the developed world. They are mimicking the actions of their forebears, who were protesting taxation without representation—less than six months after the most participated-in election in at least a generation. They are not idealists, nor do they have any idea what they are talking about, but talk away they should so that someone might engage them in discourse and collectively we learn something.

Ultimately, it costs more money to reinvest in a developed economy than in a growing first-generation industrial economy. That’s why we have taxes. The problem with our taxes is that, for the past 30 years they have been invested in the wealthy, which is why the United States and Great Britain, the forebears of Reagan-Thatcher top-down economic planning now suffer the largest wealth differentials between the average citizen and the richest one-percent of the population of any developed countries in the world. Instead of protesting taxes, these people should be protesting the indifference toward the middle class of the past 30 years and demanding even greater investment in schools, basic science and other seedings of future prosperity than the Obama Administration has imagined. That doesn’t mean lots more taxes—we could do the same by simply cutting wasteful stupid spending returning half-way to the old top-income taxes of the past—it only means the priority becomes investment in the people, not a class that will save the people.

As for Mr. Kutcher, he seems like a nice enough guy. As a celebrity, he strikes me as the perfect attention zombie, stumbling through our screens to eat our brains. But the fact a television news network even bothered to compete with a B-grade actor over their popularity is a sign of how low we will stoop to conquer anything that can be defined as “high ground.” Now, with Oprah glomming on to Twitter, we are seeing spamming by celebrities desperate to retain their mass-media reputations. Oprah touts more than 100,000 followers in less than a day because so many people auto-follow, whether using a program to do so or simply because they are flattered by Oprah’s follow—that’s a spammer strategy.

In both cases, teabaggers and Twitter follower races, we’re seeing the aping of past behaviors, the Boston Tea Party and the popularity contests of high school and Entertainment Tonight!, turned into events that supposedly enact meaning, but are merely empty gestures. Tea baggers aren’t patriots, they are people convinced they are paying too much in taxes (just about the only obligation this country asks of its citizens), when the debate should be about how taxes are spent, what to cut and, if more money is needed to make the world a better place for our children, who among the current beneficiaries of that system should pay higher taxes.

Oprah, Ashton and Ev (Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter), I will not be following anyone who for all intents and purposes is a celebrity bot seeking to claw some of my attention away for themselves. I am sure that today marks Twitter’s high-water mark. Oprah’s endorsement is like being on the cover of Fortune, which, surely, Twitter and Mr. Williams will soon be.

The utility of a social ecosystem is destroyed by false followers and other aggressive species that suck the air away from the genuine exchanges of ideas and information by individual members.

April 13th, 2009

Guttenberg's wake

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 11:58 am

Categories: Business & Technology

Tags: Web, Printing, Blogger, Guttenberg, Document Management, Printers, Blogging, Channel Management, Enterprise Software, Software

Doc Searls points to what strikes me as a shallow exercise in self-congratulation by Vanity Fair, How the Web was Won, an “oral history” of the Web told by a select few, whom VF considers winners or power brokers. As Doc says, its “far from Compleat History,” but the real vacuum in the story is the total lack of the ordinary person contributing to the Web, except for the acknowledgment given to “people” by the VF-anointed masters of this universe. It’s a one-sided history.

But, Doc also wishes out loud that he wants the media and bloggers to write more about the transition from pre-movable type book production to the post-Guttenberg galaxy, a remarkably long, slow and, often, low history that I’ve been re-reading lately. Did you know, for example, that book printing and binding were largely separate industries for several hundred years? Books were shipped from city to city in bales of unbound pages—and we think developing a business model is taking a long time. Early printers didn’t even recognize that packaging their loose pages into an edition made sense.

That said, here are a few excellent sources of information on the transition from scholarly and professional transcription of books to the thing we know today as “book publishing”:

The History and Power of Writing, by Henri-Jean Martin.

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein.

The Book Before Printing: Ancient, Medieval and Oriental, by David Diringer.

Unfortunately, bloggers have written much more on the actor Steve Guttenberg, his body of work and appearances on Dancing With The Stars, than old Johannes the printer. History is still best found in books.

April 5th, 2009

Readers share some advice for Starbucks

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 6:03 pm

Categories: Business & Technology

Tags: Customer, Starbucks Corp., Store, Gold Card, Food & Beverage, Text Messaging/SMS/MMS, Wireless LANs, Telephony, Manufacturing, Cellular Phones

After I wrote about Starbucks’ internal announcement that it is launching a Digital Ventures business, I received a good deal of mail from readers about the company. Amazingly, even though Starbucks is a high-profile company, only a couple business publications picked up on the story of a new division being created.

People feel strongly about what Starbucks can do for them and their communities. The notes and some things I’ve been thinking about make for a basic master plan for the first year of the new group’s efforts:

1.) Make Wi-Fi free and easy. Reader Miles writes: “I can’t tell you how many 1000’s of times I have met people at Panera vs Starbucks for the pure reason that we all needed online access without the hassle and cost of going of TMobile connections.”

Actually, Wi-Fi is “free” with a purchase these days, but the steps for getting online are ornate and confusing, involving both logging on to Starbucks’ site and AT&T’s network. T-Mobile got the bump last year, but AT&T wrangled a deal that makes getting online at Starbucks a pain. There can be no pain. Customers need to be able to log in as easily as they turn on their laptop. And iPhone users shouldn’t need to wait for a code sent via SMS to get online with AT&T. I get the SMS for Wi-Fi access on my phone about the time I get home from Starbucks.

2.) Fix the Starbucks cards. Another reader asked why the Starbucks Gold Card, a $25 card stored value card that gives the user a 10 percent discount, always has to be swiped through the point-of-sale system twice, once for the discount and a second time to pay for the purchase. The system must do all this in one swipe in order for the company to start to learn about customers politely.

The Gold Card has won more than 750,000 members, but that should spur the company to reduce transaction times in response to that success. There is no reason for an affinity card to add to the number of steps in a transaction. Make the POS system cache the card number to do the payment, so that baristas don’t have to ask “Is there money on this card?” before swiping a second time.

Once the cards can be aware of your identity—strictly between the customer and Starbucks—there’s the foundation for a wide range of digitally enabled services, particularly the one people wrote about most:

3.) Let people order ahead and pick up their drinks with less hassle. Having spent some significant years in food service as a kid, I have my doubts about this idea, but it is one I heard from a number of readers. They want to be able to call or send SMS ahead to order their drink, which will be ready when they arrive.

The problem is that people don’t always arrive on time or, if they get distracted, at all. What then, does Starbucks do with the spoiled drink? Coffee, especially espresso, degrades within a minute or two. Whipped cream breaks down in minutes, making a drink ugly when it waits for the customer to arrive. Even though this service would be pleasing when it worked, it could raise costs dramatically without making the customer happier in many transactions.

Starbucks would do better, in my opinion, to focus on the time in the store as an opportunity to improve the relationship with customers.

4.) Let the baristas and engaged customers blog through the local screens and a store-specific Web site. The AT&T service welcomes customers to the specific store where they login. It is therefore possible to target writing and pictures within the store and Read the rest of this entry »

March 15th, 2009

Starbucks launching Digital Ventures business

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 9:08 pm

Categories: Business & Technology

Tags: Starbucks Corp., Business Structures, Finance, Mitch Ratcliffe

Starbucks is turning its eye to the digital world for part of its recovery strategy, according to an email Howard Schultz sent to partners on Friday. Shultz wrote that Stephen Gillett, who has been the company’s CIO, will take on a new line of business, Digital Ventures, to “expand Starbucks reach in the digital space in a way that is profitable in the current business climate – organizationally nimble, small and focused on creating new revenue streams for the company.” Gillett’s new title will be senior vice president, Chief Information Officer & GM, Digital Ventures.

The move makes a lot of sense, since Starbucks is a hub of human activity that can become the anchor for virtual activities, as well. This is not the first time Starbucks has gone digital, having partnered with hyper-local physical goods distribution company Kosmo.com during the bubble years. That partnership relegated Starbucks to a drop-off location for Kosmos customers. The stores are much more than that to customers. Now that technology has matured and screens and WiFi are a normal and accepted part of the retail environment for customers, the stores can tap a vital role in social and virtual markets.

Starbucks has been a fascination of mine for many years, and not just because I am slowly replacing my blood with espresso. They’ve successfully created a “third place” that is an active community and a vital part of many of my neighbors’ lives. It’s the place I go more often during the month, other than home. Last fall, I wrote about the social efforts Starbucks has been working on, including V2V (volunteer-to-volunteer), MyStabucksIdea.com, and their then-nascent Twitter presence.

I met CEO Howard Schultz at a town hall meeting a couple months ago and had a brief conversation with him, in which he wholeheartedly endorsed the idea that Starbucks’ new role is to fill the local organizational and informational hole left, in part, by vanishing newspapers. Unfortunately, I punctuated that conversation with a boneheaded reply to the question, “what do you do for a living?” I said, “It’s hard to explain,” rather than “I make media and the teams that make great media,” “I help CEOs with digital challenges” or something equally pithy and clever. Maybe I’d have a job in the Digital Ventures group if I’d not been thinking about my daughter running out into the night while I spoke to Schultz. Alas, such is life.

This expansion of the digital effort into a separate line of business is the basis for a lot of right moves by Starbucks. They will need to partner judiciously, focusing on projects that use the stores as a lens for customers’ concerns about their community or, conversely, their opportunities to connect and act globally (and commercially) beyond the Starbucks relationship.

Starbucks has thrived as a provider of selective presentation of quality food and a leisure experience, earning their customers’ trust over many years. Each new Digital Ventures business relationship has to honor that customer relationship more than the initial business opportunity. On that foundation, of the importance of the customer, Starbucks can build a range of profitable partnerships. But if they think in terms of piling offers on the customer, which Schultz clearly wants to avoid based on his comments to the customer town hall meeting I attended, each new digital venture could put the main line of business at risk.

In other news, I need to expand my disclosure page, as Doc Searls, Cathy Brooks, Thomas Vanderwall, Steve Lubetkin and I have “bonded” with AdHocnium to make the social work better for our clients.

January 19th, 2009

Let’s talk about the economics of great journalism

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 3:54 pm

Categories: Business & Technology, Media Comment & Crimes

Tags: Journalism, Coverage, Reporter, News, ON24, Team Management, Benefits, Advertising & Promotion, Management, Human Resources

Responding to various recent postings about journalism, including Ethan Zuckerman, Seth Godin, Dan Gillmor, Amy Gahran and Lisa Williams. I think the economics of journalism and ethics are deeply related and we tend to talk about them separately, emphasizing the dying channels for distribution at the expense of understanding the net loss of reporting.

When I worked with the team that built the ON24 iFinancial Network, a personalized financial news network that delivered hundreds of long- and short-form investment news each day, we tried to grow on advertising. Even though we had several million viewers who spent an hour or more a day getting much deeper reports than other sources provided—complete coverage of conference calls, analyst reports, company statements and executive speeches—advertisers were slow to adopt the idea.

ON24’s news team operated on approximately $1.8 million a year at its peak, when it was producing 28 hours, and more, of programming a day, far below the cost at competitors like CNBC, which paid just one of their anchors almost as much as ON24’s news staff of 85 full-time employees. Such radical changes in the economics of news are always possible, especially now.

Media innovation cannot be dependent on advertisers, they will not take the risk. Innovation must find a foothold with people who demand that great news be available. The users of news have to support it to get it going. In the past, rich men made this investment and we got what they paid for. Are we going to pay for better news in the coming century? Are we going to pay for it now, when media is down and change can overwhelm the old controlled media that delivers more pabulum than hard news?

Having been in and around journalism, citizen journalism and publishing for a long time, let me suggest we stop talking about the ethics of providing complete and useful information to citizens of a democracy, which are barely changed by the requirements of social media and cloud computing technology, in isolation from the economics of journalism. If someone delivers great journalism on a regular basis, what does it cost to do it? What is it worth to you to get better news coverage of an important issue?

Let’s posit that if the journalism is “great” or even “good,” it will be ethical, and face the problem of paying for the change we want. Unethical reporting is not journalism.

Forget about advertising and the like as a means of support. What’s a solid source of useful reliable information worth to you? A dollar a month? Twenty Read the rest of this entry »