"The perception is that everything must be free to get scale. I don’t think it’s right and I think it’s a bit of a shame"

The CEO of London's Financial Times, which bucked convention by raising its cover price by 150% last year and still charges for content on its website, has an interesting take on the transition to digital media. One key factor, he says is:

When any industry is facing disruption, the single most important lesson is to differentiate yourself and focus on what makes you different

He goes on to embrace the need to be a niche product--of narrowcasting instead of broadcasting--and of the necessity of creating quality news.

apple pwns your podcast

A recently unearthed patent filing shows Apple looking into methods of taking podcasts and turning them into user-customizable pieces, able to be cut up and put back together as a new, single, piece of audio or video ready for download into your iPod or iPhone. What to the who now? you ask.

The podcast could consist of one or several segments selected from a predefined set of continuously updated media categories on a digital download service, such as the iTunes Store. A 20-minute customized podcast, for instance, could consist of a 5 minute segment from CNN on the day's national news, a 5 minute segment from a local news station, and a 10 minute segment on sports highlights from ESPN.

In other words: pwned

It's an audio and video version of a customized RSS feed, breaking the content away from the content provider. It's a powerful tool for users--I'd love to put together my own podcast of a few minutes of a number of different newscasts--but it's yet another blow to the people actually making the podcasts and videocasts being hacked.

It once again raises the crucial question of the 21st century: If everything is dependent on content, but the model for creating that content has been completely broken, how does the content get made?

What do you do when Al Qaeda understands the Internet better than the New York Times?

While the major media companies continue to wallow in the idea that Internet publishing can be a mass-audience game, a new study shows that Al Qaeda--yes, that Al Qaeda--fully understands the concept that Internet publishing is no longer about broadcasting, but instead narrowcasting. Take a page from the terrorists, folks, because that's the future of the industry (not the blowing-up part, but the different-audiences-want-different-things part, duh).

PS. Thanks to Paul M. Davis for the link!