Author Archives: Michael Becker

A simple request

By Michael Becker | Published: August 18, 2010
When asked by a business to take down comments critical of that business, what is a newspaper to do?
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Rumors of the Web’s death may be exaggerated

By Michael Becker | Published: August 17, 2010
Wired's headline says the Web is dead, but that's a bit of an exaggeration.
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Journalism’s salvation is hiding in a mountain of data

By Michael Becker | Published: August 3, 2010
Matthew Ingram writes at GigaOm that the newest defense of pay­walls for news­pa­per web­sites is to com­pare them to subscription-based ser­vices that have found great suc­cess, such as HBO or Sirius satel­lite radio. The par­tic­u­lar exam­ple Ingram notes comes from vet­eran tele­vi­sion host Peter Funt, writ­ing in the Wall Street Journal. Funt con­tends that peo­ple com­plain­ing [...]
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Whistleblowers probably won’t like paywalls

By Michael Becker | Published: July 26, 2010
.bbpBox19591464433 {background:url(http://a1.twimg.com/profile_background_images/10653372/coloursbgd.jpg) #ffffff;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block} I think that if I were a whistle­blower, I would have no inter­est in tak­ing my brown enve­lope to a media orga­ni­za­tion with a pay­wall.less than a minute [...]
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Limiting our Web site

By Michael Becker | Published: July 23, 2010
I am in some­thing of a bind. My newspaper’s cor­po­rate own­ers want to reduce the num­ber of sto­ries that we put on the Web each day. I can under­stand their sur­face rea­son­ing. Why give it away when we offer a paid online alter­na­tive? (I do not think the paid online alter­na­tive is a qual­ity prod­uct for [...]
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