"it is still, apparently, impossible to be a woman and put forth a measured opinion about one of your own without it being twisted into some kind of screed-ish, unsisterly attack."

"By plundering your own life for material, you are not investing in yourself as a writer; you’re spending the principal. Soon, it will all be used up. There is nothing more painful to watch than a writer desperately grasping at ever less-important aspects of their own lives in order to make word counts, until they must simultaneously eat lunch and be writing about eating that lunch at the same time. It is the most small-minded interpretation of “journalism” there is. It is sad…The extent to which we train a generation of young writers to become robotic insta-memoirists is the extent to which a generation of stories from the wider world does not get told. The real tragedy of journalism-as-narcissism is not the general pettiness of the stories it produces; it is the other, better stories that never get produced as a result."

"Producing investigative journalism on the web is not really hard (or any harder than it normally is) if you’re producing other content too i.e daily items about the latest news and trends. If your focus is purely investigations, you will struggle to build a web operation. The economics of blogging and online news publishing dictate that you must publish stories frequently. The average tech blog, for example, posts 10-20 short form articles a day. It’s how they increase their readership (and consequently, attract advertisers). But investigations can take weeks, months and years to complete. So unless you have a few hundred reporters working for you, you’ll never be able to post as much as TechCrunch. So you’ll struggle to build your audience and advertising base."

"

Tablets, it turns out, are a great way to consume content which was designed for some other medium, like books, movies, and videos. But weirdly, magazines and newspapers are having a harder time of making the transition: there are many books I prefer in electronic format, but there isn’t a single magazine or newspaper which I’d rather read on the iPad than on paper.

The promise of the iPad was that it would usher in a rich-media world combining the versatility of the web with the high-design glossiness of magazines; the reality is that it fell short on both counts.

"

"Circa may well succeed for certain types of news, but it’ll be because of the inherent attributes of providing easy to digest facts in a new format that I described above, not because people feel some tyranny of the article. The article has already adapted throughout time and will continue to do so. All it means is a newsy collection of words. I don’t get how paging through one-sentence flash cards makes that substantially different. It’s just a collection of words with different pagination. In fact, if I’m one handed, trying to read a story while I do something else, continually hitting a forward button would be more of an annoyance."

"Digital is fantastic, [with] fantastic opportunities, but only 30% of our revenues come from digital format. So, to say we can sustain a business for a long time with a high level of journalists with this mix of revenue is very, very difficult."

"Probably the biggest value shift that’s taken place in journalism over recent years has been the increasing centrality of argument to the minute-by-minute lives of writers and reporters. Of course, the give-and-take of debate has always had a cherished place in journalism, whether on op-ed pages or in opinion magazines. But with the rise of blogging and especially Twitter, journalists are spending more and more time immersed in the world of retorts and clever one-liners than ever before. Today it’s inarguable that the journalistic world places a much higher premium on debaters’ skills than it did even four years ago. Last week, we were reminded that Mitt Romney has those skills in abundance. And journalists—not surprisingly, given the current values of our profession—rewarded him handsomely for it. "

"

[According to Ryan Holiday in his new book “Trust me, I’m Lying”], you don’t read the [Huffington Post] to learn, but to be tracked and studied like lab rats whose data is mined like blood diamonds and is for sale to the highest bidding advertisers. They push your buttons, you click theirs. That’s the business model…

This tactic is not just relegated to Huffington Post, but to most of the major blogs such as Business Insider, Politico, and Gawker. “Blogs are there to manipulate you,” said Holiday. “In many ways, the truth, the facts, the research, and the attribution of quotes are irrelevant because of how bloggers are paid.”

Holiday contends that you don’t really care what is fact or fiction because of how your emotions are poked and prodded: readers are like a cattle that never quite get slaughtered, but are moved through a deliberate cattle-herding process of ongoing double-clicking. In the process, you the reader get to feel understood by sharing your anger or dissension with other like-minded individuals and that makes you feel good.

Holiday further contends that the issues are secondary to them to the extent that they can get you to a) click on the articles and read them; b) rate the article from 1 to 10; c) stay on the site and read related articles; and d) share the article on Twitter or Facebook. Why else do they give you the ability to login with your Twitter or Facebook credentials?

"

"if you accept the idea that each human life has the same value and dignity, and there is no consistent objection to seeing images of the dead from other countries, it’s hard to mount a reasonable argument against what editors here chose to do. To put it clearly: They made the right call."