Posts Tagged ‘Encarta’
“The press is a blind old cat yelling on a treadmill”*…
Well, in any case, it’s been a trying time for journalism. What’s next? The estimable Nieman Lab polled 21 experts…
Each year, we ask some of the smartest people in journalism and media what they think is coming in the next 12 months. At the end of a trying 2024, here’s what they had to say…
They’re all eminently worth reviewing, but your correspondent would call out a few:
Nick Petrie: “The year newsrooms tackle their structural issues“
Many publishers remain anchored to hierarchies born in the print era, with editorial at the center and product and technology bolted on as afterthoughts…
Ben Smith: “Back to the Bundle“
If media companies can’t figure out how to be the bundlers, other layers of the ecosystem — telecoms, devices, social platforms — will…
Alice Marwick: “The mainstream media will lose its last grip on relevancy“
The gap between mainstream media readers, people who get most of their news through influencers or partisan social media, and people who barely think about news at all will create a fundamental schism in how Americans see the world… 2024 was the year “disinformation” outlasted its usefulness. Moving forward, we should not be concerned with isolated incorrect facts, but with the deeply-rooted stories that circulate at all levels of culture and shape our points of view. The challenge for 2025 is to confront these deeper epistemic divides that shape how Americans understand the world…
And on a more positive (albeit, more distant) note, Adam Thomas: “Impact investment enters the chat“
Somewhere in the future, beyond 2025, a flourishing landscape of adequately financed, equitable media enterprises will deliver impactful content, serve diverse communities, and achieve financial independence…
These and the other provocative pieces at “Predictions for Journalism, 2025,” from @niemanlab.org.
(Image above: source)
* Ben Hecht (from Erik Dorn, his first novel, written while he was a journalist covering the aftermath of World War I in Berlin for the Chicago Daily News)
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As we contemplate civil discourse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1768 that the first volume of the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica was published by its Edinburgh-based founders, Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell. It relatively quickly attained a reputation for excellence in its summarization of knowledge. It prospered in print until the digital revolution and the advent of, first Encarta (which decimated print encyclopedia sales), then Wikipedia (which has much broader and often deeper coverage than a print encyclopedia can, and which has continued to improve its reliability to a level approaching that of EB).
“Wikipedia is a victory of process over substance”*…
The earliest extant version of the entry on Switzerland in Wikipedia
Wikipedia was born in January of 2001. Initially only in English, it quickly became multilingual; the English version is now one of more than 200 Wikipedias, but remains the largest one, with over 4.6 million articles. Wikipedia is the sixth-most popular website and the Internet’s largest and most popular general reference work. As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors each month, and more than 22 million accounts… But of course the site had much humbler beginnings.
First Drafts of History collects the earliest extant versions of Wikipedia entries– allowing users to compare, say, the entry above with the current article on Switzerland.
My, how we’ve grown!
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As we ruminate on reference, we might send gilded birthday greetings to William Henry “Bill” Gates III; he was born on this date in 1955. Among his many accomplishments as the head of Microsoft, Gates oversaw the 1993 launch of Encarta, a disc-based encyclopedia. Microsoft created Encarta by purchasing non-exclusive rights to the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia, using it as the basis for its first edition. Microsoft had originally approached Encyclopædia Britannica, the gold standard of encyclopedias for over a century, in the 1980s; but Brittanica’s owners, the Benton Foundation, declined, believing its print media sales might be hurt; in the event, the Foundation was forced to sell Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. at below book value in 1996 when the print sales could no longer compete with Encarta and the Microsoft distribution channel, which focused on bundling copies with new computer systems. In 2009, Microsoft stopped updating and supporting Encarta, which had migrated to the web; it had been overwhelmed by Wikipedia.
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