I read an interesting story in the NYT today - Mourning Old Media’s Decline. It wasn’t a feelgood piece:

“It’s been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline. On Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper. Time Inc., the Olympian home of Time magazine, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated, announced that it was cutting 600 jobs and reorganizing its staff. And Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, compounded the grimness by announcing it was laying off 10 percent of its work force — up to 3,000 people. Clearly, the sky is falling. The question now is how many people will be left to cover it.” [BTW, Time Inc may have a hard time in a digital age - it didn't mention its own story on its own web site...]

That’s an important question. Where do we go to get our news? For me it’s the New York Times homepage every day. And if the paper fails because online advertising fails to keep up with the decline in paid subscriptions who will report the news? Really, think about it - all the technology in the world will not bring us up-to-the-minute breaking news if no one is reporting it.

The “cesspool of useless information” line in this post’s header is not a lament from an old school journalist either, it’s from Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google.

Babara Kiviat, a blogger for Time Mag’s The Curious Capitalist blog, has discovered two new things - Threadless and crowdsourcing. In a post yesterday entitled crowdsourcing worked on me she marveled at how Threadless works - it’s a user-driven business and its products are voted upon and ranked by its customers and/or site visitors. It is a highly successful and profitable business. Good job digging this up Barbara, Threadless has only been around since 2000. More details can be found at Skinny Corp the company that owns Threadless.

Meanwhile crowdsourcing is a term that was first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article and has been open to debate ever since. It’s worth reading the Wikipedia page about crowdsourcing where you will discover that Douglas Rushkoff and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales both have serious doubts about the term and its implications.

Nice to see Time keeping its finger on the popular culture pulse though.