Who’s your source on that, chief?

Oh ho ho — Bill Keller, spilling the beans (or just gab­bing like the rest of us):

I’m hop­ing we can get the news­room more actively involved in the chal­lenge of deliv­er­ing our best jour­nal­ism in the form of Times Reader, iPhone apps, WAP, or the impend­ing Apple slate, or what­ever comes after that.

This is note­wor­thy not just for gossip-y rea­sons. Even if he isn’t talk­ing as an insider, Keller’s a jour­nal­ist — he and his reporters prob­a­bly have good info on this. Just how impend­ing is impend­ing? And is the NYT ready to do some­thing real in that for­mat, and related ones, like the iPhone? 

Some­thing cool is going to be hap­pen­ing soon.

One Response

Zack says:
October 26, 2009 at 8:43 am
I’m also curi­ous to what degree news­rooms are imple­ment­ing these inno­va­tions in house to scale down the cost of oper­a­tions. Maybe Matt has some info on this (I guess Robin too, from his expe­ri­ence at Current). 
I was just read­ing Anderson’s Long Tail (I know it’s old, but it’s for a class and I’d just never got­ten around to read­ing it) and it got me think­ing about news oper­a­tions’ eco­nom­ics. If tech­nol­ogy is increas­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion and ease of access to con­tent, thus dimin­ish­ing what peo­ple are will­ing to pay, isn’t it time these large news oper­a­tions imple­mented this same inno­va­tions in the news­room. Does this mean sell­ing the Times lucra­tive office build­ing, scal­ing back office space, allow­ing reporters to work from home and tele­con­fer­enc­ing (not to men­tion the costs asso­ci­ated with the print­ing machines — some­thing I admit­tedly know lit­tle about)? Has this been men­tioned any­where? To me (some­one who has worked in news rooms, albeit tele­vi­sion), it seems almost waste­ful to drag out the mis­con­cep­tion that an org needs this large struc­tural­ized office economy.
Maybe the prob­lem isn’t with the deval­ued price of con­tent, but with the over­val­ued price of production.
OK, sorry if that’s a bit off-topic but I just lit­er­ally had this thought and then read this post and it seemed at least a tan­gen­tial fit.
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