Alan Mutter News Today

Last week in our Error 402 series on the history of web monetization, we talked about the earliest secure monetary transactions on the web, soon after the National Science Foundation opened up the early internet for commercialization. There were electronic transactions over networks that pre-dated this (such as on proprietary online services like CompuServe, but…

In 1976, I was a general-assignment reporter of limited experience and minimal accomplishment. So my editor kindly fired me, then said: "Now get your ass up on the copy desk where you belong." I knew little about copy editing. So I asked my newsroom godfather: "Neil, what do copy editors do?" He looked over the…

Fewer TV news stations have helicopters than they did in 1980s and 1990s. There have been at least seven fatalities from news helicopter crashes since 2007.

For many years, while some journalists (and newspaper execs) have been insisting that a paywall is "the answer" for the declining news business, we've been pointing out how fundamentally stupid paywalls are for the news. Without going into all of the arguments again, the short version is this: the business of newspapers has never really…