Calculations, not slide rules

A great quote from a 2006 arti­cle in the American Journalism Review:

Ken Marlin is man­ag­ing part­ner of Marlin & Associates, a New York invest­ment bank­ing firm that spe­cial­izes in media and tech­nol­ogy deals. He com­pares news­pa­pers’ predica­ment to the demise of the slide rule: “[O]ne of the fun­da­men­tal mis­takes that a lot of slide rule man­u­fac­tur­ers made was in think­ing that peo­ple wanted slide rules instead of cal­cu­la­tions. The slide rule world got wiped out vir­tu­ally overnight by elec­tronic cal­cu­la­tors.” Marlin says his anal­ogy is imper­fect, because news­pa­pers are not in immi­nent dan­ger of get­ting wiped out; he expects them to be around 10 years from now. But the “news­pa­per com­pa­nies, like the slide rule man­u­fac­tur­ers, have to either adapt to the new eco­nom­ics or die.”

Related posts:

1. Calculations, not slide rules
2. Journalism can’t be a one-way street anymore
3. Richard Sambrook: Transparency is the new objec­tiv­ity, and the Internet is not your enemy