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Randy Cassingham's BlogHistorical Details and Author's Notes from This is True® - the First For-Profit E-mail Publication (and Still Going Strong). |
I'm Being Watched
The Online Journalism Review (published by the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication) did an interesting story on "Value-added E-mail: A Publishing Alternative to the WWW".
The article features Yours Truly, written by News Editor Matt Welch of Tabloid News Services.
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A nice mention, but Welch missed one glaring point, and one subtle point. First, it's absurd to trumpet up the idea that e-mail is some sort of new "alternative" to publishing on the web, considering I've been doing it for more than four years now with great success, in fact even before I actually had a web site at all.
As for the subtle: it was suggested I said "only Web-savvy publications will make money." No no NO! I said would-be Net publishers must understand the online culture, not the web culture! The web and the Net are not the same thing! It's a common mistake, but the misunderstanding of this point is a major reason so many sites fail.
Yes, the web is a subculture -- but it's not the entire Internet, and it's rather foolish for "leading" industry pundits to miss that fact.
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