Bay Area People

mediabistro.com' Daily News Feed editor David Hirshman interviewed former San Francisco Chronicle editor, cable exec, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, media consultant, and "Reflections of a Newsosaur" blogger Alan Mutter for our "So What Do You Do?" series.

An excerpt:

If you were in charge of The New York Times and were faced with that paper's problems today, what would you do to insure it's still around in five years or 10 years?

I would be developing a number of niche, premium products that you could charge money for, because I believe the high-quality and specialized content is very valuable, and a place like The New York Times can get paid for doing its job by selling that information. The other thing, which I've discussed at some length, is to move into more intelligent advertising systems.

I think that we've come to a point now, in terms of the arc of the printed product, that where the customer is and where the economy is are the two factors at hand. If the economy were healthier, there would probably be more money to support the production of the physical product. We are in a definite long-term economic drop that works against the print product. At the same time, we're also in a clear demographic shift, where younger people don't prize the print product as much as older people embrace it. So I think you have to plan for having ever less reliance on the printed product. I would be thinking about building out channels of information and building community around those channels. If you want to play in the new media world, you have to act like a new media company. Yelp is, Twitter is—and newspapers aren't right now.

Full interview at: So What Do You Do, Alan Mutter, 'Reflections of a Newsosaur' Blogger?

As part of its "So What Do You Do . . ." series, BayNewser's parent company, mediabistro.com, recently saw fit to interview local social gaming guru Mark Pincus, CEO of San Francisco-based Zynga, the Web's largest social gaming company. With close to $100 million in annual revenue and 30 million daily active users, Zynga's path has been anything but ordinary.

Some highlights of the discussion:

FORTUNE posted its annual list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business, and the Bay Area has ample representation.

#8- Carol Bartz, CEO, Yahoo. Says Bartz in the magazine's accompanying "Powerful Women: How they do it all" feature: "I love to work. I love to run companies. I love to help people I work with. And I don't let anything get in the way of doing what I love"

#11 - Ginni Rometty, SVP, Global Sales and Distribution, IBM
2008 Rank: 14

#12 - Safra Catz, Co-President, Oracle
2008 Rank: 16

#22 - Sheryl Sandberg, COO,Facebook
2008 Rank: 34

#39 - Meredith Whitney
2008 rank: 35

#40 - Lorrie Norrington, President, Ebay Marketplaces
2008 rank: 46

#44 - Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products and User Experience, Google
2008 rank: 50

Bill McKibben isn't exactly a media guy, but his organization, 350.org, which is looking to slow the global climate crisis, is based in Berkeley.

Stephen Colbert isn't exactly local, but he is a media guy.

When the two shared the stage of the Colbert Report, hilarity ensued.

Leave it to a San Franciscan to buck the trend of immediate media by writing a story that takes a thousand years to read. Or so Jonathon Keats will have you believe.

Keats, a journalist and conceptual artist, has his story on the cover of the current Opium Magazine. Not inside the magazine and teased on the cover, but on the cover itself.

The story is only nine words long.

The cover is printed in a double layer of black ink, with descending levels of ink used for each word. This means that when the cover is exposed to sunlight, the ink will fade, one word at a time, over the course of a millennium. That's the theory, anyway.

"I'm interested in exploring deep time," Keats said in an e-mail to Wired.com, for which he writes the Jargon Watch column, among other things. "Like most people, I live my life in a rush, consuming media on the run. That may be fine for reading the average blog, but something essential is lost when ingesting words is all about speed. My thousand-year story is an antidote. Given the printing process I've used, you can't take in more than one word per century. That's even slower than reading Proust."

According to Wikipedia, Keats has previously sold his thoughts as an art exhibition, copyrighted his mind and attempted to genetically engineer God.

Our sister blog FishbowlNY did some sleuthing and got the scoop on how Virginia Quarterly Review blogger Waldo Jaquith discovered that portions of Wired editor Chris Anderson's new book Free were cribbed from Wikipedia.

It all started with a good-old-fashioned reporter's desire to be on top of things:

During the passage from Free in which Anderson describes the saying "There's no such thing as a free lunch," Jaquith noticed that something was amiss. "It mentioned Crescent City and then, parenthetically, said New Orleans," he said. "At first, I was thrown off. I thought that maybe that before it was called New Orleans it was called Crescent City and I was mad at myself for not knowing that."

Full story here.

San Francisco's The Rumpus, a literary website edited by local author Stephen Elliot, posted an extensive interview with Dave Eggers yesterday. The author of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" and founder of 826 Valencia has a new nonfiction book, "Zeitoun," set in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, as seen through the eyes of a Muslim-American family. It's coming out in a few weeks, shortly after "Away We Go," a movie Eggers co-wrote with his wife, Vendela Vida, directed by Sam Mendes.

The talk touches on Eggers' new book; his previous effort, What is the What, an account of a Sudanese refugee; the foundations funded by his literary efforts; the state of newspapers in general; and the attitudes of youth toward newspapers and reading.

Some highlights:

A little while back,we told you about how 826 impressario Dave Eggers told the Authors Guild at their annual dinner that print is not dying.

At that dinner, Eggers also announced that, if anyone was despairing of the future, all they had to do was to email him.

Apparently a bunch of people took him up on the offer (much to his surprise: "I didn't foresee it getting out there on the web. (Shows how much I know.)"), so he's now drafted a mass email to explain his thoughts. Some choice observations:

Though Memorial Day honors the fallen, today is probably still a fitting day to note that Craigslist founder Craig Newmark is a big proponent of supporting present day veterans.

"I figure that anyone serving in the armed forces has committed themselves fully to serving the country. I take that personally, so I'm trying to help out, particularly trying to help veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars," he wrote on his blog March 31.

Newmark has joined the board of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a non-profit focusing on helping returning veterans and their familes. His focus is on helping them with social media and getting the word out.

Newmark recently called attention on his blog to the group's new campaign, supportyourvet.org.