In an article in Sunday’s NYT, Randall Stross questions whether Mark Cuban’s investment in the Landmark theater chain is a good one in light of the movement toward on-demand and DVD distribution of high-resolution digital video to large-screen in-home entertainment systems. In a blog post responding to the article, Cuban explains some of his thinking about why higher quality home viewing will not necessarily cannibalize Landmark’s theater business, which is migrating to digital distribution itself.
Rex Hammock notes that:
The ink isn’t dry yet on tomorrow’s NY Times, but billionaire blogger Mark Cuban has already posted a response on his weblog to a piece critical (or, at least, dubious) of him in the business section of the Times. Among Mark’s classic responses is his posting of the complete email interview the writer conducted with him. This email displays the cherry-picking of facts the writer had to perform to get to the “truth” he was trying to represent. Mark Cuban is displaying the rapid-response blogging approach possible when everyone in the world (not just someone who gets published in the NY Times) has a platform on which to instantly present their side of a story written about them. I’ll give the NY Times credit for one thing: Very prominently displayed along side the column written about Cuban is a link to his blog.
In a follow-up post, Cuban asks “Who has higher editorial and reporting standards. Your typical fulltime blogger, or the NY Times? Who puts more effort into researching their articles? Who conveys more depth?” Cuban invites and receives some interesting comments on his post, which goes on to say:
The NY Times is obviously feeling some financial pain and cutting back. Costs impact the amount of space they can provide for any article, or for all content as a whole. Bloggers do not have that limitation. I can write as many pages as i like. The NY Times is limited by deadlines. They have to get to print and get the product out the door. Bloggers do not. Costs and deadlines limit the amount of resources that can be applied to any given article for both bloggers and the NY Times. Who is more constrained as a result?
The NY Times certainly has more feet on the street than any given blog, so should they do a better job of breaking news than a specific blog? Or are there more blogger feet on the street en total throughout the blogger universe for any given topic?
Can a reader get a better understanding of the topics of the day, week, month in a given area by trusting the NY Times to present the news, or is it better to do a search of news sources and the blogosphere for keywords, topics and tags on Icerocket.com and become your own aggregator on an ajax homepage like netvibes.com, goowy.com, my.yahoo, google.com or any other personal aggregation environment?
Mitch Shapiro at 3:18 PM|Comments(0)
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