Four important bits from this interview with former NYT digital guy Martin Nisenholtz.
“Human-mediated content is important to me because it both introduces a hierarchy of importance as well as a kind of serendipity.”
“If you’re in the business of creating news and information, you get these kind of blinders, where you think everybody is into it. But the fact is, when you go out and you talk to people who are not in the business, they’re leading their lives and doing what they do, and for them everything is just totally optional. … [99 percent of people] care about how what you do affects their lives. Unless you touch them, in a very meaningful way, you will fail. If you focus on the technology, or focus on what will be cool about it to a very small group of people, it’s just not going to work.”
“I really think it’s important for traditional news sources to embrace the technology side of our business — and really understand what the application side can do for content. Not just publishing content from one source and porting it into a bunch of templates.”
Here he’s referring to Twitter, but this is arguably the principle behind the rise of Facebook, too, and the stagnancy of Google Plus:
“If there are no other people on the network, it’s going to be pretty useless. But the more people that join the network, the richer it gets.”