Author: Joe Wilcox

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What is the Google Free Economy?

Today I posted the third installment of my investigative news analysis series “What Does the ‘Google Free Economy’ Cost You?”, which is being crowdfunded through Byline: “Obituary for the Fourth Estate, Part 1“. The headline derives from a subhead in the first story, which I share here, below the fold.

During the editing, I nearly broke up Part 1 in two to make a third. The first of the pair recaps how the Google Free Economy illuminated a path for new media companies as the Fourth Estate lost its way. Part 2 will look at the rise of social media and how it has fundamentally shifted authority from a small number of editors and reporters to the audience of news consumers. The initial concepts build from my groundbreaking, but largely ignored, June 2009 analysis “Iran and the Internet Democracy“. 

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Storm Warning for Apple and iPhone

On September 9, Apple will hold a media event, where, presumably, the next-generation iPhone(s) will be unveiled. The company announced new handsets the same date last year, the 10th in 2013, and the 12th in 2012. But as the big reveal approaches, shadows rise over iPhone’s future: China’s slowing economy; smartphone saturation in core markets; lower selling prices in growth geographies; the end of cellular carrier subsidies in the United States, and, most serious of all, the “good enough problem”.

iPhone rode a perfect storm of success, raising Apple’s fortunes like a tsunami crashing down on competitors. This fact cannot be emphasized enough to illustrate how the bitten fruit logo company’s fortunes could fall as quickly, and as dramatically, as they rose. All the while, Android grows from swell to monsoon. 

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I must kick the Autocorrect Habit

My apology goes to Art Alexakis, lead singer for Everclear. In a post last night observing his role as a tattoo artist in movie “Wild”, his name is misspelled. Funny thing, so to get it right, I copied and pasted from the web into the WordPress post editor. Yet somehow when published, and I missed, his name appeared as Alexis. My thanks goes to Scott Bell, who pointed out the error in Google+ comment.

It’s strange how tech meant to be beneficial gets in the way. More mistakes appear in my stories because of autocorrect than I make myself. The pattern is consistent: I will write, nix autocorrect’s misspelling, but later edit something else in the sentence. Word changes! As a long-time writer and editor, I revise constantly until publishing—and afterwards, too. The mistakes I most often miss typically are the ones made for me during spot edits.