All Things Digital

Actually, although BoomTown is staying right around the corner from Buckingham Palace in Mayfair, I am in London on my way to the PICNIC conference in Amsterdam later this week, where I will be interviewing some digital leaders onstage.

We’re still working on rolling out a version of our D: All Things Digital conference in Europe next fall, so it’s important to get a sense of what is going on here in the digital sector and, of course, what is not.

I was here in summer 2007 and also last fall. This trip, I am slated to visit Mike Volpi of Joost to talk about what’s going on at that much-hyped online video site, which is in the midst of rejiggering itself after a rocky start.

I will also be paying a call on the fine folks over at the Guardian, including its PDA digital content blogger Jemima Kiss.

The Guardian Media Group, the newspaper’s parent company, is doing some really fast-forward things in the digital arena, including the recent purchase of the paidContent new media news site.

And tomorrow, I will be having yet another grilled kipper breakfast at the very tony Wolseley restaurant with Index Ventures’ Danny Rimer to talk about the start-up market here.

Videos, of course, to come.

We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

Here’s Part 2 of 3 of an interview I did with Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer.

(I will post one video part of the discussion with Glocer once a day this week, starting yesterday and concluding tomorrow.)

Thomson Reuters was created by a merger in April that created one of the world’s biggest information companies, mostly aimed at businesses and professionals.

In this video, Glocer talks about the merger of Thomson and Reuters, how to benefit as the newspaper business struggles, how news will be delivered in the online future and what scares him, digitally-speaking.

We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety over the next two weeks in this column.

Here’s Part 6 of 6 of our interview with Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corp. (NWS) (owner of this site and the conference), in which he answers questions from the audience about competitors, the future of newspapers, China, more Sen. Obama, technology and magazines.

Here are the rest of the videos from the interview:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Sorry for the delay, but we’ll finally start posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Unfortunately, due to issues too complicated to go into, we have to post all the D6 interviews in several 15-minute parts (I know, I know).

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety over the next two weeks in this column.

Kicking off the proceedings will be what most of the attendees at the conference told us they considered their favorite interview, which Walt Mossberg and I did with News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch.

Full disclosure: News Corp. (NWS) owns Dow Jones, which owns this site and the conference.

Nonetheless, Walt and I treated Murdoch in the same way as we did all the others we interviewed and think we succeeded in being–someone has to say it–actually both fair and balanced.

The interview with one of media’s most powerful moguls was wide-ranging, including: talking about the takeover tussle between Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) (Murdoch was mystified as to why it got botched); the future of newspapers (not so pretty for most); what he will do with The Wall Street Journal (cut the number of editors, for sure); News Corp.’s MySpace (Murdoch does not use it or Facebook either); and, perhaps most interesting of all, his take on this season of presidential politics (Barack Obama?).

There was more, of course, but judge for yourself how Murdoch did.

Here’s Part 1 of 6, which covers the future of print media, including the News Corp.-owned Journal:

Here are the rest of the videos of the interview:

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

Earlier this week, I ranted on about a rant made by New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller.

Readers had a lot of thoughtful reactions.

To recap: Keller (pictured here) had taken wobbly aim at the Web and its bloggers, calling the Internet a “media tsunami” and too much of its fare “unreliable,” such as sites like Wikipedia and Google News.

“Most of the blog world does not even attempt to report. It recycles. It riffs on the news,” he said in a speech he recently gave in London, in that tiresome tsk-tsk way that must be in the mainstream media mandarin handbook. “That’s not bad. It’s just not enough. Not nearly enough.”

BoomTown, of course, disagreed. I wrote: “This is simply not true going forward, and he should have done some reporting on the subject to find out. There is an ever-increasing number of online outlets who are doing most excellent online reporting.”

Readers weighed in.

Read more »

Speaking in London last week, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller delivered a speech that sounded suspiciously like the grumpy rants of Hollywood moguls of late, who don’t like this digital thing one little bit.

To his credit, Keller (pictured here) spent the start of the speech in honor of the late legendary Guardian columnist Hugo Young expertly dissecting the appalling attitude of the Bush administration toward the free press.

Kudos to that. But then he could not resist that tiresome tendency of many mainstream journalists to blame the explosion in the popularity of the Internet for the woes of the newspaper industry.

Dubbing the Internet a “media tsunami” and calling much of what is out there “unreliable,” Keller pilloried sites like Wikipedia and Google News for not having things like foreign bureaus in war zones and because they don’t create content and do aggregate it from other media.

It’s a little odd, though, to insult such Web products for doing exactly what they do–neither Google News nor Wikipedia has ever claimed to perform the function of a news organization like the Times.

Actually, I think Keller’s real problem is the audience, especially young people, who are increasingly using those sites and others.

Read more »

Interoperate’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

Here is that video from MarketWatch about the joint interview PBS’s Charlie Rose did with John Chambers of Cisco and Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, where they trotted out that old saw about coopetition.

In other words, how the tech giants might compete, but also interoperate for customers’ sake. Let’s say we keep this one near the top of the pile, just in case it turns out differently.

Read more »

When I was in Manhattan recently, I had a lovely breakfast with blogger Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine.

We discussed lot of issues from how Yahoo is not going to make it unless it “explodes” its service (resulting perhaps in a devastated business model) to where the media business is going and other such topics.

We also talked about the idea that journalists have to become more entrepreneurial in the new paradigm. Along with the blog, Jarvis also consults and teaches and he is about to do a course at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism on just that issue.

According to Jarvis’s description of the course, “Journalism is in dire need of innovation. … The news industry needs a new, entrepreneurial spirit both inside established companies and in new, independent and sustainable journalistic enterprises. And journalism education must get better at delivering smart, entrepreneurial, innovative, business-wise and new-media-savvy journalists to the industry.”

In the class, students will actually have to create a sustainable media product and the most worthy efforts–if at all–will actually be funded.

Here’s the video of my talk with Jarvis: