Posts filed under “Mainstream Media”
Today is the day for change in your newsroom
You don’t need a fancy new CMS, a new editor in chief, new business model or prayer to start innovating today. This month’s Carnival of Journalism, hosted by Will Sullivan over at Journerdism, asks a very pragmatic question: What are small, incremental steps one can make to fuel change in their media organization? Pragmatic questions [...]
Is the downfall of newspapers really just a rebirth of journalism?
Newspaper ad revenues are again down by double digits, more newspapers are defaulting on debt and we’re entering one of the worst economic crises ever. Ad revenue will continue to dry up. Many traditional print advertisers (car dealers, real estate agents, etc) are facing tough times and some are going out of business. This economic [...]
The online ethics seal: together we can be more transparent
At ONA 08 and a week later at Poynter Seminar on ethics, I talked about my online ethics seal idea. The idea is very simple — to form a series of ethics seals that Web sites, blogs and news organizations could embed on their Web sites. I want these seals to be in the same [...]
If you could start from scratch would you build the same product?
I was just at Cleveland.com, and I was looking at all the new features the site has launched recently. Certainly, the new features are upgrades over what used to be there. The new design is a step forward. The site, however, is a hodgepodge in many ways. A lot of Cleveland.com doesn’t make sense. Different [...]
Supply and demand is a bitch
I have some lessons from ONA 08 over at BeatBlogging.Org (version 2.0 nonetheless), and I wanted to highlight the supply and demand part of the post: This is an issue facing journalism on the Web and not just beat bloggers. Right now, there is simply more supply of written content than there is of demand [...]
Jay Mariotti made the right decision to leave the Sun-Times
The real question is why he stuck around so long. If fact, I don’t understand why any star print columnist or beat reporter doesn’t just start his or her own Web site. The Dallas Cowboys Blog for The Dallas Morning news can get hundreds of thousands of page views in one day. And that’s without [...]
News organizations need to upsell users
The idea that news organizations should charge for basic content on the Web is repugnant. It’s a losing proposition. It’s a terrible, terrible idea. And journalism is filled with terrible ideas right now. But that doesn’t mean news organizations can’t charge for content. Far from it. Rather, news organizations need to create upsell features. For [...]
Using Web analytics to improve content
For years individual content producers in news organizations didn’t have an easy way to figure out how popular or useful their content was with people. But with today’s advanced site analytics, content producers have unprecedented data about users and their surfing habits. I wrote a long post about this subject over at BeatBlogging.Org. Consider this [...]
What is the future of the copy editor?
Do copy editors have a future in journalism? Will that role be drastically changing? Traditionally, copy editors at most newspapers had to do more than just edit copy. They also had to do page layout, fit stories to fixed spaces, write headlines, write captions, etc. Obviously, page layout is not needed on the Web, and [...]
I’m not a storyteller — I’m an information provider
A lot of journalists got into this business because they like to tell stories. I think that’s one fundamental reason why so many journalists have a hard time adapting to the changing news landscape. For me, it was never about the story — it was always about the information and news. So, if the format [...]