D-Critblr

5:00 - Emily

5:10 - Will

5:20 - Hala

5:30 - Angela

5:40 - Sarah

5:50 - Becky

6:00 - Jim

6:10 - Mike

6:20 - Laura

6:30 - Katie

6:40 - Fred

6:50 - Alan

7:00 - John

Peter Feld is an online content strategy consultant, editor and market researcher who has written on politics and other topics for the New York Post, Radar, Gawker, Portfolio, brandchannel, Ad Age, Mediaite and Cookie. As Director of Custom Research at Conde Nast Publications, he conducted cover tests, focus groups and reader studies for magazines including Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Allure, Details, Jane, GQ, Traveler and Wired, and helped launch Teen Vogue, Men’s Vogue, Conde Nast Portfolio, and Cookie, which he later joined as online editor. His most recent web consulting project is the relaunch of Interbrand’s site, brandchannel.com.

Prior to joining the media world, Peter worked in politics as a Democratic pollster, at firms including Global Strategy Group, Lake Research, and Hart Research, where he was responsible for the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. He was director of research for the Paul Tsongas presidential campaign, and a Dukakis for President staffer. He has supervised focus group projects on democratization in Kosovo, Croatia, and Montenegro for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, and taught political polling and strategy in NYU’s graduate Political Campaign Management program. Peter holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. His website is at: http://peterfeld.tumblr.com

A few stories for your perusal, suggested by tomorrow’s guest speaker, Peter Feld:

Lazy Eyes: How We Read Online, Michael Agger, Slate
Glossed Over: Why Can’t Magazines Get The Web?, Lesley M.M. Blume, Big Money (Slate)
The News About The Internet, Michael Massing, NYRB
How Industries Fail, Michael Nielsen (Just Part 1, the sections labeled “Why online news is killing the newspapers” and “Organizational immune systems”)
An Old-Fashioned Web Site, Howard Kurtz, Washington Post
Old Media Hands Flood Web with Cluelessness, Ryan Tate, Gawker
The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition), Ian Shapira, Washington Post
The Time Gawker Put the Washington Post Out Of Business, Gabriel Snyder, Gawker

This isn’t required reading, but they’re all good pieces and highly relevant to what we’ve been discussing.  If you have the time, they’re worth a scan.

Rather unbelievably, this is an online-only magazine. You wouldn’t know it because the layout is designed for print, and it has the idiotic page flipping function Kevin Kearney was making fun of the other day in class.

Some people will just never learn that people don’t consume content on the web the same way they do in print.  On the web people need easy, usable navigation and readable text.  This offers neither.

One of your other instructors, Alex Lange, also has some critiques, though hers focus mostly on the editing.

Naturally, the line I was trying to locate in class was right under my nose, on the “about” page:

MIT Press Journals is a mission-driven, not-for-profit scholarly publisher devoted to the widest dissemination of its content.**

… by putting nearly all of our content behind a firewall and charging $12 a la carte for articles.

** Emphasis mine.

Just a reminder: class starts at 5:30 today to give you guys some time between lectures.

Here’s a bio for today’s guest lecturer:

Lockhart Steele is the founder of Curbed.com, a network of neighborhood blogs that includes Curbed (real estate), Eater.com (restaurant and nightlife news), and Racked.com (shopping and retail). The company operates in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and is expanding to a national footprint this fall on Eater and Racked. Prior to running Curbed, he served as the managing editor of Gawker Media.

[Identify an online offshoot or web version of a major print publication that you believe fails as a companion site to its print partner. Be prepared to discuss why. Do not include subscription-only sites.]

Emily - National Geographic

Angela - GQ

Will - The Economist

Sarah - Time and Lucky

Frederico - ID

Hala - Good Housekeeping

John - Rolling Stone

Mike - Weekly World News

Laura - Vogue

Jim - Harvard Design Magazine

Chappell - Filter and CMJ

Alan - Dwell

Becky - Architectural Record

Katie - Tokion

When the entrepreneurs among you are running your various online media empires, you will discover the seemingly inexplicable yet undeniable positive correlation between scheduled presentations and unplanned server downtime. (Correlation estimate: 0.9999999.) The larger the audience, the more likely that your website will crash at the exact moment your presentation begins. I know this from painful experience(s), and the lead investor in my last company was the CEO of a hosting company—a hosting company that was hosting my sites, in fact.

This is obviously why Kevin Kearney’s company site was down last Wednesday.

But I do encourage you to take a look at it now that it’s back up—mostly because there’s really nothing there.  HardCandyShell lives off of referrals, so it works for them.