James Mitchell

"There's a heated turf war going on inside the New York Times over the iPad, pitting print die-hards against people focused on the Times' digital future. The outcome will determine pricing for some marquee content on Apple's tablet."

"The bad news for Murdoch is that it truly confounds him — keeps him up at night. It’s a nuisance he can’t shake. It confounded him when he bought it (the original plan was to buy a gaming company, but then he got talked into MySpace), telling people (anyway, he told me) he was in the “stalking business.” Then, his wife Wendi’s interest in the company meant he had to hear about it all the time, which bored him, and, worse, she was constantly traveling in her various positions with MySpace (Murdoch himself was never sure what she did), leaving him at home with the children (quite a reversal in his historical marital role). Perhaps most unnerving were the constant rumors — which he had to embarrassingly discuss with his PR people — that Wendi was having an affair with DeWolfe.

"This new generation of digital magazines, if and when they happen, should regard themselves as home-pages, or bases from which their readers can make excursions into the web. They are somewhere to focus a particular interest, to provide relevant material, and signposts to exploration. They’re also a place to return to later on."

"Last week, Google Reader accounted for .01% of upstream visits to News and Media websites, about the same level as a year ago. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits and Facebook 3.52%."

"We will end up with one and a half cities in America — Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between "conservatives" and "liberals." We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is "not a really good piece of fiction" — Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill. — two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry."