journal

So, what we all knew was coming has now finally been announced, and no, I'm not talking about a tablet from Apple.

I'm talking about the New York Times and the paper of record's announcement Wednesday that it has decided to begin implementing some form of fee for frequent online readers next year.

As my colleague Larry Dignan over at ZDNet wrote earlier today, NYTimes.com users will be able to read a small number of articles for free each month, but will have to pony up if they exceed that cap.

The Times, itself, puts it … Read more

Tom and Rafe discuss the gear they used to cover the consumer electronics show and how well it fared.

As the journalism industry gathers once again to wring its hands about the future, Google has thrown it a bone with new limitations on its "First Click Free" policy for news stories shown on Google News.

Companies that operate subscription-based Web sites--such as The Wall Street Journal--don't want to expose the full text of their articles to Google. But despite what WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch says, most of them also want their articles and sites discoverable through Google and Google News. As a compromise, Google has allowed those publishers to participate in what it calls a … Read more

NetNewsWire is a serious RSS newsreader, a feature-filled desktop app specifically designed for voracious news consumers who want more RSS features than Safari and Mail provide. Recent updates leave the interface largely unchanged but notably add the ability to sync with the popular Google Reader service, while eliminating NetNewsWire's old NewsGator service.

This app's three-paned, Mail-like interface presents a shallow learning curve, with an intuitive system for flagging, organizing, and reading news feeds--as simple previews or as full articles with NetNewsWire's integrated browser (or you can set articles to open in your preferred browser). The interface supports … Read more

Penzu, the stylish Web word processor we checked out about a year ago, is ready to make a business out of its hosted writing tools.

The company on Wednesday introduced a professional version of its service that costs $19 a year and fixes many of the gripes we originally had about its very pretty, but feature-light, offerings.

A pro membership now gets you all kinds of goodies, including a rich text editor, tags for organization, image hosting, 256-bit AES encryption on posts that you've locked, and themes that skin the entire interface to your liking. Pro users can also … Read more

Horse Rider Memories is a comprehensive database for your horse show experiences. With a layout that children can master, this is a great program for storing your history with horses.

We immediately felt comfortable with the program's simple, cartoonish layout and are confident that any child old enough to type and work a computer would also get the hang of it. The program did an excellent job of capturing every aspect of our horse shows with practically no snags. From logging in each show's performance in a journal entry to adding photos of the horse, we were able … Read more

For The Wall Street Journal's ninth annual technology innovation awards, editor Michael Totty reviewed nearly 500 entries and, with a team of judges, weighed which of the top 180 were the most groundbreaking and which were most likely to prove useful during economic hardship. The top two awards both went to medical technologies, besting energy-efficient next-generation LEDs and paper-thin flexible speakers. Affordable health tech seems to have impressed the judges as its own sort of innovation.

The gold award went to the Ibis T5000, a sensor developed by Abbott Laboratories and its Ibis Biosciences unit that can quickly detect … Read more

Sometimes ads run where they shouldn't even loiter.

I once was involved in a TV spot that was clearly meant for later viewing (it featured a CEO in a restroom, reading a newspaper) that suddenly aired at 6 p.m. to howls of uproar. We were mortally upset, of course. The media buyer was showered with, um, beer.

Which is why I wonder just what the creators of an ad for Grandin Road, a purveyor of furniture and other domestic items, must have wondered when their ad for happy Halloweeny items became entangled with a Wall Street Journal article … Read more

Jeff Jarvis, who’s admirably trying to prevent the news industry from becoming the next music industry, recently wrote an interesting blog post in which he heralded “hyper-distribution” as a valuable new business model for news organizations. Responding to some industry pundits who propose embracing shrinking audiences as an effective means of consolidation and audience loyalty, Jarvis argued:

“Since when did it become OK for media people to shrink their audiences? Since they gave up on the ad model, that’s when. But I am not ready to surrender to the idea that advertising, which has supported mass media since … Read more