Archive for March, 2008
Twitter can drive traffic
If you’re on the fence about signing up for Twitter, know this: Twitter can drive traffic to your site. This blog is less than a year old. I’m 23 years old — hardly an established brand or identity. That’s why I only have a little more than 100 people following me on Twitter. But Twitter [...]
College High Five of the Week: Mustang Daily
User interfaces matter, and that’s something most newspapers don’t get. But it’s something that the Mustang Daily thoroughly understands. Their site has a striking, elegant and simply beautiful design. That’s why the Mustang Daily gets this weeks College High Five. The design is even more striking when one considers that MustangDaily.net is powered by College [...]
Today’s Thought: Life is short
Life is too short to spend your days toiling away at a job you don’t like. With an imminent recession facing this country that will surely rock the journalism industry further to the core, it’s a good time to reevaluate what each of us is doing. A lot of journalism companies aren’t worth working for [...]
Today’s Thought: It’s time to care about the other side
Journalists have long believed their only concern was content. Business concerns, metrics, marketing, etc aren’t important to those journalists. Business staffers conversely have cared little about the content side of the business and the effects their practices have had on the content side. The definition of a dysfunctional company is one where content producers don’t [...]
Newspapers, it’s time to panic
“There is a time when panic is the appropriate response.” – Eugene Kleiner of KPCB. It’s about high time that journalists and newspapers start panicking. At least panic will lead to disruption, and often panic is the only way to forge lasting change. Too many journalists think that the Web has just brought on a [...]
Today’s Thought: Money isn’t everything
“Our question is always, ‘How do we grow in a way that is leveraged?’ We always lead with the user experience and think about the money secondarily.” – John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla. That leads us to Today’s Thought: Companies that are only concerned about making money will make little, while companies focused on creating [...]
All the words not fit to print
What words — if any — are your news organizations not willing to print? I don’t believe there is a traditional media organization (in the U.S. at least) that is willing to print every word in the English language, especially those deemed offensive. My paper is willing to print “shit” in a story but only [...]
Traditional journalism is out of touch
A new Harris Poll found that a majority of Americans don’t trust the media and believe traditional journalism is “out of touch,” according to The Editor’s Weblog. Here are two statistics that I want to home in on: More than 50% of Americans polled now do not trust the press 2/3 of Americans believe traditional [...]
Gannett considering regional copy and design desks
The Gannett blog (not affiliated with Gannett) reports that Gannett’s 10-paper Wisconsin Newspapers group is considering a plan that would merge copy and pagination work into a regional operation. Obviously, Gannett believes the plan will save money by eliminating positions and reducing “duplicate” work. Consolidating all copy editing into giant regional or statewide desks has [...]
Is WordPress secure enough?
In the past week we’ve lost two well-known journalism blogs that used WordPress. MultimediaShooter.com might be down for the count, and Matt Waite has decided to stop using WordPress after his site was hacked and his MySQL database ruined. Waite is now developing a custom Django-based platform for his new site. He is done with [...]