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I’ll admit it — I’ve kind of missed Nick Carr, and his dyspeptic blog Rough Type. After he started on his latest book, he went on a blogging hiatus, and I kind of missed reading his fulminations on a variety of things, most of which I instinctively disagreed with. I think he may have spent too long away from the blogosphere, however, encased in that 16th-century form of blogging known as “books.” Either that or the topic of his new book, which appears to be how the Internet is dumbing us down (Carr and Andrew Keen are kind of a matched set) has taken hold of him and he now believes the internet is a kind of pernicious force in people’s lives.

His latest column is about how he has come to believe — or is close to believing — that links are bad. To be fair, his argument is a little more nuanced than that. He says that links are cognitive overhead, in the sense that they distract readers, even if they don’t follow them:

Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read. Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not.

But you don’t have to take my word for it — you can go and read Nick’s argument yourself, because I have helpfully provided a link to it. You don’t have to click it if you don’t want to (possibly because you trust me to give you a fair representation of it), and you can click and open it in a tab to read later if you like, which I often do as I read things. The important thing is that I linked to it. I can also link to other things that might help you interpret it, like Marshall Kirkpatrick’s piece in response to Nick.

I could also link to a piece by Fred Wilson, a web native if there ever was one, about the “power of passed links,” in which he argues that links are the currency of the web. Like Nick’s criticism of links, currency can get in the way in our lives as well — it not only makes our pockets heavy with change, but it warps people’s minds in all sorts of ways. And yet, we couldn’t very well do without it. But links aren’t just useful to readers — I think adding them is also an exercise in intellectual discipline for the writer.

As I mentioned to a number of other people who were discussing Nick’s piece, including Chris Anderson and Vadim Lavrusik, I think not including links (which a surprising number of web writers still don’t) is in many cases a sign of intellectual cowardice. What it says is that the writer is unprepared to have his or her ideas tested by comparing them to anyone else’s, and is hoping that no one will notice. In other cases, it’s a sign of intellectual arrogance — a sign that the writer believes these ideas sprang fully formed from his or her brain, like Athena from Zeus’s forehead, and have no link to anything that another person might have thought or written. Either way, getting rid of links is a failure on the writer’s part.

As I said in a comment on Nick’s post, I fully expect his next move will be to remove links of any kind — and then to ban comments as well, as “thinkers” such as Seth Godin have, since they just get in the way of all that pure thought. And then, perhaps, Nick will finally decide that the internet itself is rather over-rated, and will retreat to his books, where no one can argue with him. And that would be a shame, because arguing with him is such fun.

There were too many highlights from mesh2010 for me to pick a single one, but among the top moments on any list was the taping of a live version of TVO’s The Agenda with the always excellent Steve Paikin. TVO producer Mike Miner and I started talking about the idea last year, because we had always wanted to have Steve come and interview someone but it never seemed to work out — so Mike suggested taping a whole show there, and after much working out of details that’s exactly what happened. It was a fantastic show, with Ontario Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian, consultant Alan Sawyer, the wonderful Joseph Menn (who did one of the keynotes at mesh), David Fewer of CIPPIC and yours truly. Thanks again to Mike and Steve and the rest of the TVO team for being such a pleasure to work with and for helping us make this a reality.

http://www.tvo.org/video/tvoMain.swf

I spent last Friday in a windowless room with a bunch of men wearing a lot of pancake makeup, but it was a lot more fun than it sounds — I was taping an episode of TVO’s great show The Agenda with Steve Paikin, something I have been honoured to do more than once. This one was about the iPad and what it means (or doesn’t mean) for traditional media, and I was joined by Jesse Brown, host of Search Engine, as well as Globe columnist Ivor Tossell and Wired writer Steve Levy, who was broadcasting via Skype from a library in a small town called Otis, somewhere in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts. We talked about the difference that a touch interface makes, the “lean forward” vs. “lean back” experience and how media outlets are offering to sell their souls to Steve Jobs in return for some semblance of hope for the future. I’ve embedded the video below.

http://www.tvo.org/video/tvoMain.swf

If you’re interested in the future of media, you’re going to want to be at mesh 2010 on May 18 and 19 for our media keynote: Chris Thorpe. Chris comes to us from The Guardian, one of Britain’s leading newspapers, where he is the Developer Advocate in charge of the paper’s Open Platform. This puts him at the forefront of one of the most fascinating frontiers in the media industry: namely, the transformation of traditional media entities such as newspapers into digital-information services that distribute their content in a variety of different ways online. And sometimes that involves experimenting too: an offhand remark during a lunch presentation by Clay Shirky, for example, recently led to the creation of a “ChatRoulette for news” called Guardian Roulette.

The Guardian’s Open Platform is based on an open API (i.e, application programming interface) similar to that provided by Google, Twitter, Facebook and other companies provide, which allows developers and programmers to use The Guardian’s content in a variety of ways, and build it into third-party services at no cost. The New York Times also has an open API, but it only provides access to a small part of the text in each story, whereas The Guardian’s provides the full text of every story.

In a blog post last year, British MP Tom Watson wrote:

I’m not bowled over much these days. But Guardian Open Platform is a chasmic leap into the future. It is a work of simplistic beauty that I’m sure will have a dramatic impact in the news market. The Guardian is already a market leader in the online space but Open Platform is revolutionary. It makes all of their major competitors look timid. Governments should be doing this. Governments will be doing it. The question is how long will it take us to catch up. (British MP Tom Watson)

Chris gave a presentation last year at the Future of Web Apps conference, which is embedded below, in which he talked about how The Guardian’s use of an open platform is “building the stacks of a mutualised newspaper.”

There’s also an interview with Chris here:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8150670&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Interview with Chris Thorpe (The Guardian) from Publishr on Vimeo.

Choire Sicha, former editor of Gawker and now co-founder of The Awl, points out that the Gawker offices have a large screen mounted on the wall that shows the top most-read stories on the site in terms of unique visitors, allegedly to motivate writers at the blog network (although it’s interesting to note that this screen is described as being in the reception area rather than where the writers can see it). Gawker also posts its top-read stories in terms of both pageviews and unique visitors, which is an interesting page to watch.

That said, however, pageviews and even unique visitors are only a couple of the factors that media entities need to be concerned about — as I tried to argue in this post (check the bottom for recent updates), based on the Twitter debate between Reuters writer Felix Salmon and Business Insider founder Henry Blodget — and neither one of them is arguably the most important. Yes, they are the metrics with the largest numbers, and so they impress some advertisers and possibly some competitors. But they are also subject to inflation by girls kissing and slideshows, as Felix noted in the tweet that started his battle with Blodget.

Denton says he agrees that pageviews and uniques aren’t the best measures, and asks for others that are better. Okay, Nick — what about time spent with a story? Why not put that up on a big-screen TV on the wall? What about the number of repeat visitors that a writer gets over a month? Or what about the number of comments on a story, multiplied by the number of times a writer actually responds? Gawker is one of the most forward-thinking sites on the Web when it comes to comments and how they are managed, and from what I have seen their writers — particularly Denton himself — are good about responding. That’s a far better metric of value in my books.

Soon, advertisers will realize that chasing after raw pageviews and
big unique visitor numbers is a mug’s game, and one that Demand Media
and Associated Content and similar content factories will win every
time — and arguably many advertisers are already realizing this,
which is why CPMs generally suck. So what starts to matter more?
Engagement. Admittedly, it’s difficult to measure (let alone define),
but that doesn’t make it any less valuable.

Update: In a tweet to me, Nick says that comments are “a horribly misleading measure, e.g. commenter delight at a blog squabble is inversely related to wider appeal.”

Mahendra Palsule also has a thoughtful post about the move from number-based metrics such as pageviews and CPMs to relevance-based measurement and tools.

Update 2: Felix now has his own response to Blodget’s tirade, in which he makes many of the same points that I tried to make, including:

Blodget should remind himself on a daily basis that publishers make money by selling readers, not adspace, and that if he’s going to make money, he’s going to have to do so by getting high-value readers that companies want to reach. At the moment, both Blodget and his advertisers are stuck in an increasingly out-of-date paradigm wherein pageviews serve as a proxy for readers, but today, unless you’re Demand Media or the like, that paradigm is doomed.

Update: Elizabeth Spiers, founding editor of Gawker, has come out in favour of Henry Blodget on this one. As she puts it in her Tumblr post:

I don’t agree with everything Henry Blodget has been saying, but between Blodget and Felix Salmon, Blodget sounds like someone who runs/has run a new media business before and Felix sounds like someone who’s never been anywhere near the business side.

She also said that while Felix was a “smart and agile writer,” she thought he was “very naive about the granular economics of an online biz.” In case anyone is keeping score, that makes one Gawker founder and one former Gawker editor on Blodget’s side.

Not content to respond to Felix just once, meanwhile, Henry has responded a second time in this post. Among other things, he says that Salmon’s criticism is unfair because “We’re publishing a huge amount of content that is exactly what this particular critic thinks we should be producing — long, text-heavy analysis, original reporting, and commentary.” And he says he loves slideshows.

Interestingly enough — once again reinforcing his argument about the economics of online publishing — Blodget’s post doesn’t have a URL packed with keywords, but it does have another money-making feature (one I personally loathe): double-underlined pseudo-hyperlinks under certain words that trigger popup advertising windows from a company called Kontera (this kind of gimmick isn’t specific to new media entities, incidentally; the paper I used to work for uses them all the time as well, although I did my best to eradicate them from the website).

Original post: There’s a certain sense of the Roman Coliseum to a good Twitter fight, which typically features two combatants (although others can throw in comments from the sidelines) and an invisible mass of spectators, taking in every uppercut or knife gash and cheering the participants on. Plenty of people crowded around on Friday when a Twitter fight started brewing between Henry Blodget, founder/editor of The Business Insider network of blogs, and Reuters media writer Felix Salmon, and the resulting skirmish was written up by Vanity Fair magazine and The Atlantic, who called it an “epic Twitter tussle” (although Choire Sicha dismissed it as a “snippy little girl-spat”). But beneath the sniping and 140-character witticisms was a real question: What does a successful online media business model look like?

Salmon appears to have started it with a tweet mentioning @hblodget’s business model thus: “Take a story about M&A fees associated with AIG. Illustrate with 2 hot babes kissing. http://bit.ly/dexECw.” (Salmon also took a shot at Blodget and his business model after Blodget fired former Clusterstock editor John Carney). For the full back-and-forth, you can check out the post that Blodget later wrote summarizing his view of the debate (just to rub it in, he turned the back-and-forth tweetstream into a slideshow). During the skirmish, Gawker Media head honcho Nick Denton even waded in with a tweet, saying: “Of course @felixsalmon has such animus to commercial web media: the online audience is so measurable and his so small.”

Blodget’s response itself is like a microcosm of his argument: a careful reader will notice that he stuffed as many potential keywords as he could into the URL of the piece, which uses his name, the word “furious,” the word “attack,” the name of the blog and the term “twitter” (check out this TMZ link on Corey Haim for another example). Both of those features — the slideshow and the URL stuffing — are designed to build traffic, either by boosting pageviews (slideshow) or by improving the likelihood that someone might find the post by searching, or that it would turn up in an aggregator such as Techmeme (in other words, search-engine optimization). So even with his summary of the debate, Blodget was making a point: as far as Business Insider is concerned, pageviews rule.

Salmon also wrote about the Twitter debate, but he stuck to the business issues behind what he was arguing about: namely, whether the model defended by Blodget makes any sense or not. That defence came in a stream of tweets following Blodget’s debate with Salmon, in which he tried to explain how online media works. In a nutshell, he said, such businesses live or die based on CPMs (cost per thousand, the price paid by advertisers per thousand pageviews). If a writer is paid $60,000, Blodget argues, then they have to generate 1.8M pageviews just to pay their salary at a $10 CPM. Hence, presumably, the slideshows and girls kissing.

Salmon argues that this model would work if the site charged the full rate for its ads, but says Business Insider (like many sites) discounts its rates in order to fill all of its pages — for which he blames the ad-sales staff. But is that fair? Not really. For one thing, lots of sites discount from their published “rate card.” But the reality is also that there is so much inventory on the Web that it’s virtually impossible to sell it all, and there is more being produced every day, thanks to places like Demand Media and Associated Content (the latter produces several thousand new pieces of content every *day*). That’s just one reason why relying solely on a bog-standard pageview/CPM-based model is an inherently flawed model.

Later, however, Felix nails it when he says that there are other monetization strategies that can apply apart from just advertising, including “syndication, conferences, stock indices, e-commerce, brand franchising opportunities, wine clubs… you name it.” Of course, there’s also the monetization strategy of selling dedicated terminals with financial data to traders, brokers and bankers, which — as Blodget notes in a tweet — is part of what pays Salmon’s salary. That’s about as old media as a business model can get, and Reuters (like Bloomberg and virtually every other traditional media entity) is also having to confront the disruption of its business model by the Web.

So what are smart online media outlets doing? Two things: One is focusing on building businesses such as conferences and events, as well as subscription-based, proprietary content (something Business Insider is also experimenting with). The other — and this is what I think Salmon was driving at — is thinking about traffic and pageviews in a different way. Not all pageviews are the same, and as a result not all CPMs are the same. Does forcing readers to click through multiple pages to view a slideshow add any real value? No. This is the digital equivalent of newspapers throwing extra copies into a ravine (or dumping them at a taxi stand) to boost circulation.

At some point, online publishers have to decide whether they are pursuing a lowest common denominator strategy of raw pageviews at some bargain-basement, remnant-priced CPM, or a higher-value strategy that focuses on building relationships with readers around content and enhancing that relationship in as many ways as possible. Felix (in Blodget’s view at least) may have the luxury of the Reuters infrastructure and terminal business behind him, but that doesn’t make what he’s saying any less accurate. And I think one of the reasons Henry reacted the way he did is that he knows Salmon is right.

Updated: I enjoy a good debate about media-related topics pretty much any time, even when I’m supposed to be on vacation with the family in Florida. Today, in between playing shuffleboard and bocce and taking the kids to the swimming pool, I had a rousing back-and-forth on Twitter with Howard Owens — who was formerly with Gatehouse Media and is now running a local news site called The Batavian — about the evils (Howard) and virtues (me) of anonymous comments. Along the way, we sucked Steve Yelvington and others into the fray as well. Did we settle the issue? Not even close. In fact, I’m not sure it can ever be settled to everyone’s satisfaction.

In a nutshell, Howard said that anonymous comments were an abomination (I’m paraphrasing somewhat) and were in fact unethical, since commenters on a news site had a “fundamental right” to know the identity of the other people commenting. I tried to make a number of points, including the fact that anonymity is a red herring, and that the more important thing in encouraging a strong and healthy community conversation is standards of behaviour, regardless of anonymity. I also tried to make the point that anonymity has its benefits, and that many people — some of whom might have valuable contributions to make — would never comment if they had to use real names (Howard made the point that allowing anonymity excludes other people).

Howard noted that his beliefs about anonymous comments come from “a vast body” of real-world experience, not just theories and supposition. While I may not have a vast body of experience, I spent several years dealing with comments at the Globe and Mail, where we routinely got 7,000 or more comments every day — and for the past year or so I was in charge of moderating those comments, so anonymity is something I not only have seen the downside of, but feel pretty strongly about (hence the debate). And I surveyed our readers about it extensively, so I know how many of them feel as well — in fact, I wrote a whole blog post about exactly that topic in 2008.

After I took the job as online Communities Editor, the first thing people said to me was “You have to fix the comments — they’re terrible.” And the second thing they said was: “We should make people use their real names. That would solve everything.” The first of those observations was arguably true, since the Globe and Mail comments were in many cases terrible. But the second observation was not even close to being true, or at least I didn’t think so. For one thing, I knew that there were some online communities that allowed anonymous comments and yet had pretty healthy comment boards, including Metafilter (one of my favourites) and Slashdot. (I’m not the only one to defend anonymous comments — a former executive editor of WashingtonPost.com did so as well, despite his earlier dislike of them).

The other thing I knew was that it is virtually impossible to actually verify someone’s identity online, unless you ask them for their social insurance (or social security) number, or their credit-card number. And while I have no empirical evidence to prove it, I have a pretty strong feeling that this would dramatically reduce the number of people who would be willing to comment (as would charging for the right to comment, which someone on Twitter suggested as a solution). And I believe that one of the principles of running a media site is that you should open up interaction to as many people as possible. Not that you don’t moderate offensive comments — far from it. In fact, I think moderation and engagement (as Steve Yelvington notes in this post) can make up for a lot of what Howard sees as the downsides of anonymity (a point Jim Lippard also made).

When I’m asked about comments, I often say that to me, comments and the ability to interact through them are like democracy. Most people support democracy and its various principles, even though in practice it is frequently ugly and brutal and betrays some of the worst elements of humanity for everyone to see (Winston Churchill said that democracy was the worst possible form of government, except for all the others). So it is with comments. And just as anonymity has a broader purpose in a democratic society — whistleblowing, for example (a point Topix CEO Chris Tolles made), and keeping a check on arbitrary authority — I think it has a purpose in comments and online communities as well.

As I mentioned during our debate, I think that persistent (and quasi-verified) identity agents like Facebook Connect and OpenID can help with some of the problems that online comments have — not necessarily “real” identity so much as persistent identity. It’s not really important that I know who Shelley456 is when she comments, but if she is Shelley456 everywhere she comments, then she has devoted some time (theoretically) to establishing that identity, and therefore will be less likely to destroy it by spewing Nazi hate in some online comment board. Sites that take advantage of persistent identity can become a little like World of Warcraft, allowing people to “level up” through good behaviour, relying on the fact that they won’t behave badly because they have devoted so much time to their virtual identities.

In any case, as I noted on Twitter, I didn’t pick on Howard because I wanted to start a fight over comments — I got into the debate because I think it’s an important issue and because it needs to be thought about and talked about if we are to get it right (and I’m willing to admit that what is right for Howard on his community news site is not what might be right for another news site or entity). Thanks to everyone who took part.

Update: John Bracken of the MacArthur Foundation wrote a post about this discussion, and so did Steve Buttry — who is director of community engagement for the new hyper-local Washington news site that Jim Brady is setting up for Allbritton Communications, and therefore is pretty interested in different approaches to reader comments. Steve’s post is here.

John Temple also said he is interested in the discussion — John is the former editor of the Rocky Mountain News and is now with Pierre Omidyar’s new Peer News startup, and his recent comments about comments started me thinking again about anonymity and how it is a red herring in online community. As Chris Garrett noted in the context of another discussion about online community, “pseudonym does not mean fake.” Jack Lail also has a post with a collection of links he has been putting together about online news site comments.

Just got back from a great visit to San Francisco (that’s it in the embedded photo), where I spent a few days with the rest of the GigaOm family in their funky loft-type office near Mission and Howard in downtown SF (just across the alley from CNET’s offices). I wish I had had more time, since it was nice to walk around without a winter coat — although all the native San Franciscoans were wearing big furry jackets and wool hats.

Pretty much everyone from the various GigaOm network blogs was there for the meeting, as well as the business side of the network. It was great to meet everyone and to get to know the different teams, including Stacey Higginbotham and Liz Gannes (GigaOm), Ryan Lawler, Janko Roettgers and Liz Shannon Miller (NewTeeVee), James Kendrick and Kevin Tofel (JKontheRun), Katie Fehrenbacher and Josie Garthwaite (Earth2Tech), Simon Mackie (Web Worker Daily) and Josh Pigford (The Apple Blog).

We had some presentations about the events of the past year, and some looking forward and goal setting, along with some great meals and a few drinks to boot. And people only made fun of my Canadian accent a few times, which was nice 🙂 Thanks to editor-in-chief Sebastian Rupley and managing editor Carolyn Pritchard (also Canadian) for all their help in getting used to how things work, as well as CEO Paul Walborsky — and of course my thanks to Om for bringing me on to the team.

Amazon’s battle with book publisher Macmillan was a valiant attempt to retain control over pricing in the rapidly changing world of e-books, but its weekend display of brinksmanship was short-lived. The online retailer yanked Macmillan books from its virtual shelves — both e-books and regular books — on Friday, triggering an online flame war with Macmillan authors and many of their supporters, but by Sunday night Amazon had capitulated and agreed to accept Macmillan’s new pricing model.

The unseen actor in this little mini-drama, of course, was Apple. With the launch of the iPad, the consumer electronics giant tilted the balance of power in the e-book market decisively away from former leader Amazon, even though Apple’s device isn’t shipping yet. The company also negotiated a new payment structure with publishers like Macmillan, which is being referred to as the “agency model.”

Please read the rest of this post at GigaOm

Is the newly launched Apple tablet, the iPad, beautiful? Yes. Drool-worthy, in fact. Will Apple sell a lot of them? If the iPod and the iPhone are anything to go by, then yes — and at $499 for the basic version, they are priced to move. But does the iPad contain anything that could be seen as throwing a lifeline to the foundering ship of traditional media? Well, no.

Once you get past the hype (of which there has been a boatload), the iPad is really just a larger version of the iPod touch, with some interface and usability tweaks thrown in around things like email, games and e-books. Has the iPhone changed the traditional print media business? Not at all — unless you think selling an app for your publication (as Conde Nast has for GQ) is a game-changer.

Yes, the New York Times app looks impressive, with video that plays right inside the newspaper display (although you can do that on the NYT web site, too). But will a fancier app change the nature of the newspaper business or the magazine business? No.

Please read the rest of this post at GigaOm

Have you ever applied for a job and wondered why you didn’t get it, even though you were qualified? According to a new survey, there’s a good chance that the person doing the hiring found something about you online that they didn’t like. The survey done by Microsoft found that 70 percent of HR professionals in the U.S. have rejected a job applicant based on what they found out about that individual by searching online (that number is lower in other countries).

As part of Data Privacy Day on Thursday, Microsoft says it conducted a survey of 2,500 people that included, consumers, HR managers and recruitment professionals in the US, the UK, Germany and France, with the goal of learning more about attitudes toward online reputation and how this information can have real life consequences. The survey found that the top online factors for rejecting a job applicant are unsuitable photos/videos, concerns about a candidate’s lifestyle and inappropriate comments written by the candidate.

Please read the rest of this post at GigaOm

There’s been a lot of debate lately about the value of joining a Facebook group as a form of protest, and whether that just constitutes digital “slacktivism,” particularly in the context of the Facebook group opposing the proroguing of Parliament (if you don’t have any idea what that is or why you might care, there’s a brief overview here).

I recently talked to Steve Paikin, host of The Agenda on TVO, about whether Facebook activism matters or not in the larger scheme of things, and whether it would translate into real action (as it turned out, it did — last weekend, after the show was taped, more than 25,000 people across the country showed up to protest). The video is embedded in this post, and is also available on YouTube and at the TVO site.

On the subject of Facebook’s validity as a grassroots political tool, I tried to point out to Steve (as my friend David Eaves did in his piece for the Globe), that a Facebook group membership is something that deserves to be paid attention to, and that in fact joining such a group arguably means more than a petition, since membership in a group is a public act.

In addition to Facebook, Steve and I also talked about the success of the “text money to Haiti” campaign, and how the volume of people doing that — more than $25-million has been raised by the Red Cross in the U.S. alone through texting — says a lot about the positive side of digital activism. We also talked about the value of Twitter in the context of a disaster like Haiti, when it acted as a real-life newswire of on-the-ground sources.

I have to confess that I’ve been sitting here for a long time, looking at a blank screen, trying to figure out what to say in this post. Getting to the point is easy: as some readers probably already know, I’ve decided to leave the Globe and Mail to become a senior writer with the GigaOm blog network, which is run by my good friend Om Malik (who has written a blog post about my joining the company here).

That’s the short version. The long version, of course, is somewhat more complicated. The part about joining GigaOm is easy to explain — I’ve been a fan of Om’s ever since I discovered his blog in 2005 while he was still working for Business 2.0 magazine, and came to like him even more when we had him at our very first mesh conference in Toronto in 2006. He doesn’t hesitate to shoot down popular perceptions, and when he speaks his mind it is always worth paying attention to, even if (and in fact especially when) you disagree with him about something.

Over the past few years, Om and his team have put together what I think is one of the world’s premier technology blog networks, one that has a well-justified reputation for thoughtful and intelligent reporting and analysis, something that has become even more of a necessity as the Web has filled up with fast-food style news hits. I’m honoured to have been asked to join GigaOm, and to work with its terrific writers. It feels like the first day of school and I get to sit with the cool kids 🙂

That said, I would be lying if I said that leaving the Globe and Mail after 15 years isn’t difficult (I’ve actually been working for the Globe for almost two decades, if you count my time at the Financial Times of Canada, which was owned by the Globe when I started working there in 1991). Despite my excitement at joining GigaOm, leaving somewhere after that length of time is never easy. And working at the Globe was a dream of mine ever since I graduated from journalism school.

There are plenty of things I’m not going to miss about working at the Globe, particularly in its ancient Front Street headquarters — including the often underwhelming cafeteria (not the fault of Bozenna, the world’s nicest cashier), as well as the world’s slowest elevator, the moldy carpeting, a distinct lack of windows and a lighting system that wouldn’t look out of place in a run-down 1960’s suburban rec room.

What I will miss is working with some of the finest journalists anywhere, a group of relentlessly smart and talented (and in many cases charmingly eccentric) reporters and editors, who manage to turn out a great newspaper every day under incredible pressure. On the Web side, I will miss the tremendously resourceful group of writers and editors who do the same under even more time pressure, with a deadline every minute, and manage to juggle several jobs, and some balky technology.

I want to make it clear (in part because a bunch of people have asked) that I’m not leaving the Globe because I think newspapers are dead, or because I think the Globe is going under, or anything of the sort. I think it’s pretty obvious by now that the newspaper industry is going through a tremendous upheaval, a clash of evolutionary forces that will cause some to expire and others to thrive. I think — and hope — that the Globe is well positioned to be one of the entities that can adapt to those forces, and in fact it has already gone some distance towards doing that.

Evolution is a messy business, however. And changing the tools that people use is not the hard part — changing the way people think and the culture they work in is the hard part (in some cases, it may even be impossible). And doing that while you are still operating a traditional legacy business, one that still provides the bulk of your revenue, makes it even harder (the old saying about “building an airplane while flying it” comes to mind). The Globe has made some progress in that department, and is making more every day, but there is still much left to do.

Part of me is sorry that I won’t be around to help the Globe continue to make that transition. I can’t say that it hasn’t been frustrating at times, because it has, especially the seemingly endless meetings and debates over policies and procedures — not to mention the fear and uncertainty that often underlie them — that can get in the way of journalists engaging with readers in a real and human way. I happen to believe that doing this isn’t just a “nice to have” feature, but is a crucial part of what journalism is now (a point I tried to make in my TEDxTO talk back in September).

Those battles are someone else’s to fight now, although I will be happy (and may even feel compelled) to provide advice from afar. Instead, I have the good fortune to be moving to an organization that doesn’t have to worry about legacy print products and declining revenues — an entity that is Web only, is growing rapidly, and has social media woven in and out of the very fabric of the company. A nice change 🙂 Onward!

In 1958 Isaac Asimov wrote a short story titled "All the Troubles of the World" (included in the collection "Nine Tomorrows"). It described a world transformed by Multivac, a giant all-knowing computer. Asimov died in 1992, a mere four years before Larry and Sergey started their project "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful." Below are selected quotes from Asimov’s story (no spoilers), next to relevant imagery from Google.

via Neil Fraser: News: Google Multivac.