Weekend Reads 14

This Week’s Stories: media, tech, small biz, and culture

By Jeff Howland

The leaked New York Times innovation report is one of the key documents of this media age

by Joshua Benton, Nieman Journalism Lab

There are few things that can galvanize the news world’s attention like a change in leadership atop The New York Times. Jill Abramson’s ouster this week probably reduced American newsroom productivity enough to skew this quarter’s GDP numbers. It’s an astonishing look inside the cultural change still needed in the shift to digital — even in one of the world’s greatest newsrooms. Read it.

‘West Wing’ Uncensored: A Look Back at the Early Years, Long Hours, Contract Battles, and the Reason for Those Departures

by Lacey Rose, Michael O’Connell, Marc Bernardin, The Hollywood Reporter

Sidney Poitier was the first choice for president; Bill Clinton was a fan; and Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme created a show “about democracy run by a couple of Kim Jong-ils”: an oral history of the heady, liberal, poli-sci fantasy, 15 years after NBC greenlighted it.

The Goat Must Be Fed: Why Digital Tools are Missing in Most Newsrooms

by Mark Stencel, Bill Adair, Prashanth Kamalakanthan, Duke Reporters’ Lab

Many U.S. newsrooms are not taking advantage of the emerging low-cost digital tools that enable journalists to report and present their work in innovative ways. Editors and producers cling to familiar methods and practices even when they know better, more engaging digital alternatives are available, often for free.

The Internet of Things Will Thrive by 2025

by Janna Anderson, Lee Rainie, Pew Research Internet Project

Many experts say the rise of embedded and wearable computing will bring the next revolution in digital technology. This report is the latest research report in a sustained effort throughout 2014 by the Pew Research Center Internet Project to mark the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal

by Harry McCracken, TIME

Invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, BASIC was first successfully used to run programs on the school’s General Electric computer system 50 years ago. In the 1970s and early 1980s, when home computers came along, BASIC did as much as anything else to make them useful.

Trove

“The most sophisticated people I know – inside they are all children.”

Jim Henson died on this day in 1990

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