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May
17
Where to hear more about platform-agnosticism (is there such a thing as platform gnosticism too? I happen to really like this compound phrase of Goldberg’s):
1. WCPN’s Sound of Ideas tomorrow:
Local movers and shakers dominate our Thursday roundtable. A local commercial real estate interest gets interested in new markets in Russia and the Ukraine. The court battle over development of the Flats neighborhood heats up. Retail magnate Bob Stark promises to move his headquarters downtown as he prepares to launch a major downtown project. And, in the business of the media, we’ll chat with the Plain Dealer’s new Editor-in-Chief. Join Dan, Jay Miller of Crain’s Cleveland Business, Henry Gomez of the Plain Dealer, and from the ideastream economics desk, Tasha Flournoy, Thursday morning at nine on 90.3.
Listen live from here or through a download from here later.
(I’m not on the panel – I think they’re keeping me away on purpose) (that’s a joke – promise) (well, at least, I think it’s a joke – Paul? Dan?) (just KIDDING! – of course it’s a joke) (right?)
2. If you can’t wait for SOI tomorrow, you can listen now to this 22 minutes interview with Goldberg, posted on the Plain Dealer’s Weekend Diary Business blog. A preview:
- On how she came to Cleveland: “I was initially recruited for this job. … I did not have any intention to leave San Jose, certainly for the next few years. I had always kind of had it in the back of my mind that I would stay through 2009, which would have been my 10th year as a top manager there. … Then maybe I would teach or work in the community at a foundation. … But when I got this call, it just was so intriguing to me, and the opportunity to work at the Cleveland Plain Dealer was so intriguing to me that I had to follow up. And the more I learned, the more I liked.
“… The decision to want to come to Cleveland to take this job at The Plain Dealer is the easy part. The hard part is leaving the wonderful people in San Jose, the people who’ve hung in there, the people who were very loyal to me and who I feel very loyal to. … In the end, I think we all kind of reach a point where we say we’ve got to do something different with our lives.”
- On the future of newspapers: “We’re becoming a 24-hour-a-day, platform-agnostic information industry.”
- On her role as editor: “Well, I’ve never said, ‘I’m an executive, I just oversee what’s going on.’ I am not a gentlewoman journalist. I am much more of a roll-up-your-sleeves kind of journalist. … The more I can be involved in what’s actually in the paper, the happier I am.”
Any echoes of Katharine Graham?
Platform-agnostic…hmm…I do like that term…
By Jill Miller Zimon at 1:26 am May 17th, 2007 in Politics
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13 Responses to “Listen to how the Plain Dealer will enter the "platform agnostic information industry" under the helm of Susan Goldberg”
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“information industry” rings like “news as a commodity.” Hmmmm.
Well, that’s one way to look at it, but I know I think of blog readers as news consumers…so I’m not sure it’s a pejorative thing, necessarily.
Maybe not, ‘just leans a bit towards entertainment and not information in the best sense. Reading Monday about Minneapolis ST and today about Reuters trustees waiving the ownership rules prompts my worries that, without those “quaint” newsrooms with plenty of hunter-gatherers roaming, where would the blogs get their facts?
I’ll think about it some more and chat again soon.
I appreciate that. In that spirit, I would say that we can also think about how the news consumer has evolved – because I don’t think we can argue that the news consumer hasn’t changed. Tail wagging the dog – I don’t know. But with the plethora of options for where and how to get information, people are making choices for where and how…they get information. Because they can.
Information in the best sense…hmmm – you’re going to give your identity away me thinks…?
I think you mean neutral, without opinion or slant. But we know that what gets into whatever paper or magazine is considered to be the least biased or slanted still represents some editor’s work.
So…I think that, whether or not it’s a good thing, this idea of information, as pure, is also becoming more and more narrow – you know what I mean?
There’s “the meeting will be at such and such a place at such and such a time” and “the Cavs scored more points than the Nets and won the game.”
But everything else? I don’t know…subject to slant, I think…
Connie Schultz said today at the Akron Press Club that Goldberg mentioned that at her former place of employment women made up half the staff. The implication was that the PD’s isn’t anywhere near that percentage. It really is amazing that it has taken so long for a woman to be editor in chief of the PD or any other newspaper business.
Hi Village – I saw your post just a few minutes ago too – sounds like it was a good event. I read that thing about the 50% women staff too. Glad to hear it – let’s see what happens! Need to start with that damn editorial masthead…
“platform agnostic”? what a high-falutin’ way to say you print stuff and post it to the web…
Hey! I love that high-falutin stuff!!
Which, by the way, was one of the first words I remember having to look up in college – I’d never heard the term gnosticism before, maybe not even agnostic.
Aw – come on, G, it’s a great word – just look at it.
On Being Platform Agnostic
Google to the rescue. It looks like the mighty NYT first concocted the term “platform-agnostic” in newspapering over 2 years ago, per this:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_03/b3916001_mz001.htm
But, cut to the chase here:
http://altref.blogspot.com/2006/03/on-being-platform-agnostic.html
and find this snip:
“An interesting concept he discussed was multi-plat-fornication or being platform agnostic. They don’t consider themselves a cable station, but rather a content provider. It goes like this…. A fan watches a program on TV, then logs online to get extra footage and insider info, then blogs about it, shares the experience with friends and makes new friends who have a common interest, downloads a photo to a cell phone, and loads additional content into an ipod. On air, online, on-the-go. They strive to push their content everywhere their viewers are. They want to be on every platform possible since their viewers are using all types of technology in a social context.”
Works for me! It’s all about providing “content.”
Yeah, that’s great. Dick Feagler’s curmudgeonly column all over the place…
From my above snip, if I write a blog post, e-mail content to a friend, and create a snail-mail version as a letter to the editor, am I now doing the “multi-plat-fornication” thing. Looks like “platform agnostic” is a little less risqué, don’t ya think?
Thinking about the media of production as a platform, I’m worried about all those bird-droppings on my monitor screen! Oh, well.
2Much – thanks for that citation re: where the term originated. Sounds like a William Safire piece any month now. As for what it actually is and whether it’s risque (how did you get the accent on the e in there?), I still go with this: it’s what the consumer calls it, not what the provider says it is. Period. That we’ve ever delineated news the way people are splitting hairs over it now is kind of silly when you think about it. We use all kinds of resources and always have and SHOULD. In fact, it’s the labelling and narrowing of what we select to be our sources that causes polarization, IMO.
G – now, now.