Open Culture has just posted a brilliant interview with Stephen Fry, recorded in April 2010. There are some genuinely insightful thoughts on social media, mentoring, kindness, critical thinking, learning, technology and life.

A few thoughts on what makes good content:

1. Good content is honest. It does not pretend to be more important, more useful or more complete than it is.

2. Good content is supported. No content should be published without a maintenance plan. Publishing is the beginning of its life, not the end of the job.

3. Good content does not waste words. Every paragraph, sentence and word should work for its living.

4. Good content cares about what readers think about themselves. The aim is not to show how smart you are. It is to help readers become smarter.

5. Good content is well presented. Presentation tells readers whether you care. They usually notice.

This list is a work in progress. Let me know if you think I have missed something.

LinkedIn has published an interesting study of economic trends across various industries over the past five years.

The most revealing part is this chart. The two sectors at opposite ends of the scale, Newspapers and Online Publishing, are effectively in the same business. Yet Online Publishing is growing strongly, at +24.3%, while Newspapers are shrinking badly, at -28.4%.

That gap is hard to dismiss as a problem with demand for information. People are still reading, sharing and paying attention. The weaker explanation is that publishing is in decline. The better one is that a particular model of publishing is in decline.

This is where the legacy mindset becomes expensive. If you define the business around the format, the old structure looks like the thing worth saving. If you define it around the reader, the opportunity looks rather different.

Thorsten Heins, CEO of RIM:

We are undertaking a comprehensive review of strategic opportunities including partnerships and joint ventures, licensing, and other ways to leverage RIM’s assets and maximize value for our stakeholders.

There is a lot packed into that sentence, most of it defensive. Partnerships, joint ventures, licensing, assets, stakeholder value. It reads like a company trying to rearrange the business before asking why people stopped caring about the product.

‘Stakeholders’ is one of those useful corporate words that makes everyone sound included while saying almost nothing specific. In RIM’s case, the missing word is more revealing.

Customers.

Micromanagement is a lazy label because it describes the behaviour without asking whether the behaviour has a point.

In the presence of a good strategy, close attention to detail can simply mean care in execution. The work is being protected because the direction is clear.

Alongside an average strategy, the same behaviour starts to look like ordinary micromanagement. The detail is still being controlled, but the control does not improve much.

Without a strategy, it becomes something worse: mismanagement. People are being managed closely without knowing what the closeness is meant to achieve.

Detail only helps when it serves a direction. Otherwise, it is just supervision with better stationery.

If you define the problem as ‘we need more page impressions’, you have already put the focus in the wrong place. Once the metric becomes the goal, shortcuts that may damage the product suddenly become viable. Worse, they become easy to justify.

A better frame is to ask why people are not finding enough value to stay, read, return or continue. Fix that, and the page impression problem starts to look rather different.

In other words, stop trying to lose weight and get healthy instead. By ‘getting healthy’, I mean fixing the user experience, although I hope that part was fairly obvious.