Wednesday squibs (snow edition)

Oh, the weather outside’s delightful, but I think I’ll stay in, at least until we’re down to flurries. Meanwhile…

• The shrinking newsholes: Online edition. Andrew Potter at McLean’s Macleans Online with the latest doofy idea for “saving media” — a tax on ISPs that would be collected for the media companies. Includes this bit of nonsense: “The problem is that no one is making money, not print, not online, not new media, not social networking sites. No one.” Ah, Andrew? Print still makes money. Just not as much. (Note: See the comments, re: the correction.)

Actually, before I continue, allow me to rant for a minute. Media can still get my money, when they give me a reason to pay. I still buy music, I still buy books, I still by magazines. I still buy all those things for their content. When I look through my local daily and ask what I is there of value in here that I would pay for, the answer is not much. (end rant)

• Canadian business leaders step up social media spending. I’ve been meaning to point to Gillian Shaw’s Vancouver Sun piece since it was published a couple of days ago. If the goal of newspapers is to go where their readers are going, shouldn’t the business goal be to go where their advertisers are going?
• The Digital Slay-Ride. A reality check for journalists from Jack Shafer at Slate. A sample: “Before we get too weepy about lost journalistic jobs and folded publications, let’s ask how often reporters lamented the decline of other industries, products, and services swamped by Rossetto’s digital typhoon.”
• Eye on Image-Making: Visual Clichés. A nicely-reason essay against clichés in photography. Read and heed. (Not that I can plead not guilty to having taken many clichéd images.)
• Atlanta: A new vision for the Sunday newspaper. The emerging conventional wisdom about Sunday newspapers is that they should be chock full of good investigative pieces, in-depth features, narrative storytelling, great analysis, etc. The Atlanta Constitution-Journal, on the other hand, has discovered what its readers really want is news, hard enterprise and high story counts.