Aram Zucker-Scharff

“Now that’s some mighty disruptive thinking: Instead of hiring people to take care of customers, why not entice other employees to do it, and pay them in crustacean instead of cold cash?”

– When the forces of disruption hit home.

“”Who’d want to buy dozens of newspapers? The industry’s print advertising revenue is in barely controlled freefall, down eight percent a year since 2011; this budget season’s now-familiar gut-wrenching forecast for 2015 is the same. Paywall-related revenue and digital advertising initiatives have only partially offset that loss. Consequently, figure it’s been 84 months or so of unending downward revenue trajectory; 2007 was the last year of significant revenue growth. Only deep cost-cutting, including the downsizing of America’s daily newsrooms by 30 percent or 20,000 jobs, has maintained high single-digit to to low-double-digit profitability. How long can that strategy last before the last print subscriber cancels in frustration?””

– The newsonomics of auctioning off Digital First’s newspapers (and California schemin’).

““We’re slipping, as [the journalism] industry and maybe as a society, back to a place where women didn’t get the same opportunities and didn’t have the same influence.””

– Where are the women?

“I understand what you mean when you say your relationship with advertisers and developers is complex. But your readers, the people whose blogroll is occupied by your websites and then Reddit and 4chan and 9gag and on and on, they may not understand – or worse, they may misunderstand that relationship. This is where you need to spend time clarifying everything. You need to let some sunshine in on your operations so that no one can credibly accuse you of shady dealings again. This has the added bonus of lending some credence to the idea that games journalism is actually becoming more professional.”

– “Gamergate” and Media Ethics in Trade Writing.