If the news is that important, it will find me
I first read that quote in this Brian Stelter article in the NYTimes which notes that one consumer stated it during a market research session.
That line sums up something really important.
I asked for something like this on Twitter a while back, and the lazyweb gods have answered: a Safari and Chrome extension that takes articles from popular sites that are broken across multiple pages to boost page views and merges them into one page. It saves you the trouble of finding the Print or Single Page link and clicking it yourself which seems like a minor annoyance but becomes a massive one when multiplied across dozens of articles every day. [hat tip to Daring Fireball]
No doubt about it, serious news organizations are in a tough bind trying to monetize. But making the user experience significantly worse to protect display ad revenue is attacking the symptom, not the problem. The problem is that most advertising is lousy and ineffective, and users, given a choice, will try to avoid it. In most news organizations, I'm guessing the journalists sit on a different floor or in a different wing from the ad sales team. It's not in their nature to try to actually improve the effectiveness of the advertising in a meaningful way; advertising has always been the second class citizen that pays the bills.
If you have a product or service that has many close substitutes, and if the core of your revenue model is something you don't spend a large percentage of your mindshare obsessing over, it's not surprising that your entire business is vulnerable. Even successful market leaders consistently fortify potential vulnerabilities. Think about how much Amazon obsesses over logistics, or how far up the supply chain Apple has invested in materials and chipsets.
Most people think of Google as a search company, but they have some of the smartest people in their company optimizing and improving AdWords, their primary source of revenue. Their ad auction model is continually refined by mathematicians and economists (sometimes those are one and the same). They try to improve their advertising for the entities on both sides of the exchange -- the advertisers and the end users -- by maximizing interaction rates.
When was the last time we heard any journalists or news organizations talking about the effectiveness of their display ads online?
The hamburger makes an ideal sausage, he said, because the meat flavor isn’t diluted by the curing salts used in hot dogs, and beef is more tender than pork because it has lower levels of myosin, the protein found in muscles. But there’s still enough myosin so that when the proteins are heated, they bond to create a gel that holds the patty together without the need for a casing.
The result is a cooked meat that’s less rubbery than other sausages and has a fresh-cooked taste that can’t be matched by cold cuts or reheated meats. It succulently exploits the Maillard reaction, named after a 20th-century Frenchman who explained the chemistry of browning meat and other foods.
When the beef patty hits the hot grill, the water at the lower surface quickly boils away, producing a very thin, dry crust, actually a transparent gel, called the desiccation zone. Immediately above is the Maillard zone, where heat causes reactions among sugars and proteins that turn the meat brown, yielding molecules with an intrinsically appealing flavor — at least to most humans.
That's Nathan Myhrvold breaking down the unique appeal of hamburgers. Josh Ozersky, the author of The Hamburger: A History, traces the genesis of the modern hamburger to White Castle and a man named Walter Anderson. Who knew?
Ozersky says Anderson's critical breakthroughs were "to use a specialized bun (instead of bread slices), to cook the meat on a very hot grill (500 degrees Fahrenheit), and to press down on the patty with a customized spatula made of high-strength steel."
Myhrvold has his own take on the hamburger in his 50+ lb. cooking tome Modernist Cuisine, and it involves sous vide and liquid nitrogen. Anything involving liquid nitrogen is impractical for the home cook, but a simple way to improve your home burger is to buy or make hamburgers with a higher fat content. The low-fat craze in America has too many people buying lean patties that taste like dried, salted shoe leather when grilled.
The ideal end state of the perfect burger doesn't seem in dispute: the center should be medium-rare, evenly pink like a ribeye steak from edge to edge, and and the outside should be seared or charred to add the magic Maillard magic. Leave out the liquid nitrogen and perhaps the basic technique of sous vide with a finishing sear on a cast iron skillet may work. I'll have to try that. Lots of discussion of hamburger secrets here.
While I'm not a hamburger fanatic, I've had more than my share over the years, from In N Out and McDonald's on up to the $32 D B Burger at Daniel Boulud's DB Bistro with its truffles and foie gras. I dig the Double Shack at Shake Shack in New York City, and just as I left LA I heard from many friends that the best burger in LA could be found at The Tripel.
Says Ozersky:
There is an inevitability to the hamburger. It is the most concentrated and convenient way a person can cheaply eat everything that people like about beef.
I'm learning so much about layering flavor. Normally, when you cook in the French palate, you have salt, fat, usually some form of acid—citrus, wine. Herbs, spices, but that's pretty much it. One thing that blew me away was the nam prik pow, the chile shallot relish we're making. You're going to get the snap of the chile right off the bat, but the finish is so layered: heavily caramelized garlic, the fish sauce, the acid punch. Not knowing all that much about Thai cooking before, I'm discovering a different way of building flavors.
There's always something really up front— raw garlic, raw chilies, these flavors are the first step, they push into your nose, you get them immediately. Then there's something mid-palate, then something stewed out and cooked down that gives you a long finish. It's fascinating.
In soul music, sexuality should never be self-evident. Stank, a term which loosely defines the oomf a singer puts into a phrase, is at its purest when it comes from an outsider, who, for whatever reason, wants, nay, needs, to assert herself onto the audience. Pretty girls have a particularly tough time with stank — as much as Beyoncé snarls and groans and humps the stage, it's tough to believe that Queen B. has ever been anything but the Queen. The evidence of her hotness engulfs the timbre of her insistence. But because Amy Winehouse was odd-looking, because she dressed like a scarecrow at a Hot Topic sample sale, the assertion of her sexuality had to be grounded elsewhere.
That's Jay Caspian King remembering Amy Winehouse.
There was no doubting her street cred when it came to the hard living she sang about. Blowing up with a song titled Rehab before she went to rehab. The irony of the lastname Winehouse. The police reports and occasional meltdowns at concerts which had people fearing for her death before it even happened. It's tragic that the ultimate confirmation of the authenticity of her, everything about her, was a premature death.