DAN

“We decided to prioritize digital over everything else. We were no longer going to be ‘The Atlantic, which happens to do digital.’ We were going to be a digital media company that also published The Atlantic magazine.”

That must have been a frightening prospect for a number of people, I suggested in a conversation with Smith at The Atlantic‘s offices last month.

“It’s easier to be ‘digital first’ when your legacy business is not strong, when you have nothing to defend,” Smith explained. “At the time, all we had to defend was red ink.”

This is a terrifying prospect, but I understand its implications. Building a digital media company is so very difficult when you have a thriving print media company. This piece on Mashable is a great read.

The web has become too big and noisy. The design community has helped guide us through some of the slush, and search technology has made leaps filtering and personalizing information for us.

But while algorithms once threatened to replace gatekeepers, online media will see a move back to the future: professional, human filters (the artists formerly known as editors) will play an integral role in the next web after all.

This great piece articulates well the value of an editor, and how there's a void now that will be filled by the editors' comeback. I'm a huge fan of aggregation. However, bot-driven aggregation sucks in even the best applications today. Human aggregators [editors] are exactly what digital media needs. Badly. Now!

Gizmodo reported on some fun stuff in news technology:

The New York Times Company's Research and Development Lab studies novel ways to deliver news to people. Their latest creation is a bathroom mirror that uses Microsoft Kinect to detect motion and deliver a stream of news while you comb your hair or put on your makeup.

I think the R&D lab at the New York Times Co. has too much time and money on its hands. And yes, that comment is fueled by envy.

That race, however torturous, has been run in the arena of slow economic growth. If, in fact, we do dip or tumble head over heels into another recession, all bets are off. The wheels may come off the wobbling [newspaper] industry.

I just don't understand why all analysis of the "newspaper industry" (such as the clip of the above piece posted on Niemanlab.org) is tightly focused on the big newspaper companies. So much of what's really working in the business is getting ignored. Also, for some reason the trend is to examine a newspaper company's "success" in the digital space to forecast whether it will be successful.

Many newspaper companies are still doing just fine - indeed thriving - in the print space alone.

We can hear the great resonance in this transition for news and magazine publishers. First the principle: Spend your time on tomorrow, not today. For print publishers, that means moving as much of the thinking and as many of the resources to digital as possible — now. How about making “print” a division of a news(paper) company?

I'm not sure the Netflix model applies perfectly to the news business, but this article on neimanlab.org makes great points about investing in the future of news and the value businesses get from making that investment.