“Like to remind folks that a newspaper is actually the first mobile app”

From today’s Milwaukee Business Journal:

Fans of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s print edition can take heart: The CEO of the newspaper’s owner predicts continued publication of a hard copy “for a long, long time.”
Milwaukee is the media market where Journal Media Group (NYSE: JMG) has the greatest daily newspaper penetration with consumers, so the print edition will remain safe for the foreseeable future, said the company’s CEO Tim Stautberg.
“I suspect in a market like Milwaukee, it’s a long, long time (for continued printing),” Stautberg said at a joint luncheon Tuesday of the Milwaukee Press Club and the Rotary Club of Milwaukee at the Milwaukee County War Memorial.
Stautberg has been CEO of the new publicly traded company since April 1 after the closing of a transaction involving Milwaukee-based Journal Communications Inc. and Cincinnati-based E.W. Scripps Co. Prior to taking the helm at Journal Media Group, Stautberg was the top newspaper executive at Scripps.
Journal Media Group consists of the Journal Sentinel, 13 former Scripps daily newspapers and a number of community newspapers.
The print edition of daily newspapers remains the preferred way of attaining news for many consumers, Stautberg said. He said 45 percent to 50 percent of adults still read newspapers.
“To me there is still a habit that is very important to a lot of folks in the communities where we operate off reading a physical product,” he said. “I like to remind folks that a newspaper is actually the first mobile app.”

30,000 Hits Later

Just hit a cumulative 30,000 hits on my WordPress blog. Yeah! Not major media but more than my Hotmail and Facebook friends list combined.

Guess I have work to do to maintain this little franchise…

Why Did Blog Hits Double?

I began my blog, Applewoody, in November 2009. From 2010 to 2011, my annual and daily blog hits almost doubled.

Why? Am I getting more creative and interesting, or just more accustomed to this format of expression?

Stay tuned…

Bill Gates Foresees Reaching Out With Computers, in 1995

Looking forward 20 years or less, from 1995, Bill Gates of Microsoft foresaw the computer as the ubiquitous communication device it is today. From his address to the Economic Club of Chicago, April, 1995, at the dawn of the internet age:

“Certainly within the next 20 years the impact here in the United States will be very, very dramatic…

“The first 20 years were really about creating a tool that would allow us to build documents, and it was a tool of the individual. That’s very different than the computer that came before, which was a tool of organizations. But the primary way that you got a benefit out of the tool was that you would type in your word-processing document or your spread- sheet or your database and you’d print something out; take it to a meeting. And so it was only you, working alone, that was sitting at that device.

“What I’ll talk about that comes in the next 20 years is that, rather than being a device for an individual, or even a computation device, these will turn into communication devices. And devices that are so far beyond, in terms of their presentation capability and their location capability, something like the phone is, to redefine how we reach out into the world at large…”

15,000 Views to Date

Just passed a cumulative 15,000 blog views today. Sounds like a lot, but that’s since November 2009. The good news, I guess, is that the rate of viewing has rapidly increased, but the question is: who’s that looking at it?

Kantor on What the Internet Doesn’t Change — and What it Could

One capability I find missing on the internet, at least in a form as easy to access as Facebook, is a similar time-shift communication device that would be based upon spoken language and not written messages. I miss hearing the actual voices of my friends and correspondents. Yes, we could call one another on the phone or Skype, but that’s real-time, and does not provide the advantage of time-shifted correspondence, that I can listen to whenever it is convenient.

Rosabeth Moss Kantor, the former Harvard Business Review editor, has a thoughtful article regarding what the internet has NOT changed in society, based upon her attendance at an internet conference sponsored by France before the recent G8 meeting there. My idea for a voice-based Facebook employs at least one of the principles she espouses — that the internet must retain the human touch.

In the comments section of her article, which reflects on how the internet has empowered the individual (the Arab Spring), one writer also cautions that increased controls of the internet (for example, stricter copyrights for music), could gradually eat away at the freedom of communication the internet enables. He posits that this erosion of freedom could reflect the desires of government for information control, and prevention of future Wikileaks-style embarrassments. Good point.

Ms. Kantor’s article does indeed get one thinking about role of the internet — this sort of second planet — on human communication, in commerce, education, and social interaction in general. Here’s a link to the article: http://blogs.hbr.org/kanter/2011/05/the-internet-changes-everythin.html

Web Presence Without a Website?

Indeed, a great and mostly cost-free solution for many, including myself. From today’s Wall Street Journal;

*This article can also be accessed if you copy and paste the entire address below into your web browser.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748703859304576309791299294436-lMyQjAxMTAxMDAwOTEwNDkyWj.html