Congratulations to Perlentaucher! Let’s see how the FAZ guys will ventilate their frustration this time.
Drawing a Map
Paul Bradshaw is a colleague teaching online journalism at Birmingham City University. His Online Journalism Blog is recommended reading for anybody interested in the profession. Two days ago he started a wiki-based Online Journalism Atlas to give an overview on the state of the trade in the rest of the world (meaning, basically, Non-US and Non-UK). Already there are some contributions about Switzerland and Brazil. (A more substantial article on Switzerland is as yet unlinked from the Atlas’ homepage.)
Today I’ve contributed a short piece on the state of online journalism in Germany.
Stranger Than Fiction
The tragic fate of FBI agent John O’Neill is one of the many ironies in the mythical set of events culminating in September 11, 2001. Reading Lawrence Wright’s gorgeous book “The Looming Tower” which also includes a detailed account of O’Neill’s hapless fight against Al-Qaeda, I am struck by the power and significance of its story.
No wonder the fall of the Twin Towers has triggered so many conspiracy theories. There is already so much plot and meaning in the whole affair, with heroes, villains and a lot of moral twilight in between, that you might simply be tempted to connect everything into an even denser web of theatrical action.
Wright’s book is a healthy antidote, though. It is so thoroughly researched, plausible and well-written that in the end one is satisfied with the account one gets. And curious to fill in even more details.
A Very Familiar Optical Illusion
Whenever an Indian demographic appears as a numerator, the resulting number looks big. But whenever its population is in the denominator, the number looks small. Its like looking at the same phenomenon from opposite ends of a telescope.
Simon Cox: Running fast, in: Economist, Nov 10, 2007
Passion for History
Harper’s, a renowned leftist US monthly, has had authors as illustrious as Jack London, John Stuart Mill, Mark Twain or Hunter Thompson. Harper’s former editor, Lewis Lapham, who left the magazine in 2006, has recently started a new project with a highly original program: Lapham’s Quarterly will take current political or cultural topics and present them against a background of historical thought. As Lapham writes in his editorial,
About the methods of pacifying cities bloodied by civil war, I learn more from Machiavelli’s Discourses or the Memoirs of William Tecumseh Sherman than from the testimony of General David Petraeus or the commentary on Fox News. When I see Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani being bundled around the country in a flutter of media consultants fitting words into their mouths, I think of the makeup artists adjusting the ribbons in Emperor Nero’s hair before sending him into an amphitheater to sing with a choir of prostitutes.
To get an impression of what this is all about, don’t miss the magazine’s blog, aptly called Déjà Vu (unfortunately as yet without RSS feed). Click on the pictures in one of the blog entries to summon the ghosts of the past.
Setting the Tone
So, finally this Weblog has gotten back to its original visual identity: The header shows the beginning of the score of Domenico Scarlatti’s otherworldly beautiful Sonata in b minor (Kk. 87), a melancholic little masterpiece accessible even to the piano novice.
Transcendental Infant
Even though it is still pretty much under construction, I want to point to another new project of mine. The weblog is part of a fledgling research project on Chinese Online Media that will keep me busy throughout much of the coming year, and who knows…
(The title of the blog is a tip of the hat to my old sinology teacher Friedrich Alexander Bischoff.)
First Look at the Portals
Trying to come to grips with the all-important topic of Chinese portal brands and their strategies. I’m still crunching the available numbers and details, but here are some first observations:
Reading the 3rd quarter financial reports of the big players, one thing that becomes obvious is the overwhelming importance of (meaning also: dependence upon) a still tremendously growing advertising market. Car Industry, IT, and Finance are the most important customers.
QQ, Sina and Sohu have very popular blog services, providing roughly between 10 and 20 percent of their web traffic. But the business models are still unclear. QQ monetizes on its service by selling virtual items for blog decoration. Sina is doing some experiments with context ad revenue sharing, but is still in very early stages with some celebrity weblogs as playing ground.
Sohu’s most significant recent success is in the gaming sector, driving their gaming revenues up by several hundred percent. They’ve been following QQ’s success in online gaming with Tian Long Ba Bu 天龙八部, an inhouse-developed 3-D online game based on a popular novel and CCTV series. It earned them more than 10 million US-Dollars since its launch in May.
No report yet about the outcome of the new Sohu 3.0 blogging environment, launched on the day of my last arrival in Beijing in late July. (I’ve seen Sohu CEO Charles Zhang raise the Sohu 3.0 flag.)
The portals seem to be still suffering from the loss of one of their most important former cash-cows: mobile ‘value-added’ services. The pains are due to changed government policies in the last year and more competition from the mobile providers themselves.
Nothing New Under the Sun
Faz.net has relaunched. Another news website in Germany looks like anybody else. (Talking about Spiegel.de, Focus.de, Suedeutsche.de, Welt.de,…)
Come to think of it, I should be rather proud, as the recipe everybody is converging upon is basically the same that we came up with nearly 10 years ago when we worked on the 1998 Spon5 relaunch.
If you compare what is now standard to our original solution, only the main section navigation has been taken from the left side to the top at most sites (including spiegel.de, but with the notable exception of welt.de). Some (like Focus, Welt and Sueddeutsche) have settled for a two-column area for the smaller department teasers and headlines – something we had also considered for Spon5 (as you can see from the following scribble), but finally decided against.
The scribble (click on it for a larger version) does not show the final version of Spon5, but an earlier stage of development. Along with the very elegant first designs by Peter Fischer of the Multi-M web agency it would make for a great little museum exhibit. (Fischer’s vision, though a little heavy on the graphic side, is still in many respects superior to the present run-of-the-mill layout in my eyes.)
Other progress we’ve made in the weeks following the scribble:
- Convincing Fischer that the middle column with additional teasers and navigation belonged to the right side, even though this seemed a little boring even in the late 90s;
- Introducing the now-common sequence of highlighted lead story teasers, followed by the department sections, each with a smaller lead story and some headlines, respectively.
So much for the pre-history of the current Faz.net relaunch. But seriously, couldn’t you all come up with something new after such a long time?
Janko’s Media
Just recently I have asked myself, How is my old friend Janko P.? After the former head of Frankfurter Rundschau’s online department had married Manhattanite Kate K. and both of them vanished to the Big Apple, I had lost track of the couple. Now a backlink shows me that Janko is blogging his New York life. Rather infrequently, with mostly not more than one posting a month, but who am I to judge… 🙂