NYT Publisher Says Not Focusing on Engineering Was A Serious Mistake

curtwoodward writes "You'd have a hard time picking just one way the traditional news business stumbled into the Internet era. But America's most important newspaper publisher says one mistake sticks out. In a recent discussion at Harvard, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. of the New York Times said newspapers really messed up by not having enough engineers on hand 'building the tools that we're now using.' Instead, the the news business faces a world where outsiders like Facebook and Twitter control the technology that is distributing their work." Or maybe those outsiders are just better.

Comments

Re:Private entetise controlling speech

[intermodal]

The flaw in your reasoning here is that you are assuming two fallacies are true.

First, that people single-source their information. Even a given individual gets most of their news from the AP, for example, it doesn't mean they chose the AP. Perhaps they were linked most frequently to these articles. A method by which they probably are exposed to a great number of other information sources, but with the AP getting the most exposure for that individual.

Second, that the companies actually control the content that most people see. Facebook, for example, may be disturbingly Big Brotheresque in their policies, but their degree of censorship consists primarily of punishing breastfeeding mothers who post photos and deleting fan pages for Social Fixer, while allowing basically everything else but hardcore sex.

If you want more freedom of speech than the corporate providers are willing to provide, get your own server and promote it. Even in the days of Geocities, there were certain controls on your use of that space, and the alternative of running your own server has always been the primary way to ensure the freest of speech.