Posts filed under “online media”
In defense of anonymous comments
“Banning unsigned online comments undermines the media’s role as a forum for debate.” — Bill Reader.
What’s competition these days, anyway?
Over at Wired Journalist’s someone asked what to put online first and what to hold for print. He mentioned that staffers were worried about the competition getting ahold of their scoops. Here is my response: Online everyone is a competitor and no one is a competitor. As in, what you view as your competition has [...]
Subscribe to comments is a must-have feature
Every Web site that allows users to write comments should also have a mechanism to allow users to subscribe to comments. Subscribing to comment is a way of notifying a user when new comments are left, typically via e-mail. This simple feature is a great way to foster deeper conversations and increase page views. It’s [...]
What should the Online Ethics Seal be officially called?
We need your help naming the Online Ethics Seal. The Online Ethics Seal has been the tentative name. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be the finalized name. In fact, many of you have said don’t like the connotation that a “seal” brings. Maybe this is more of a code of ethics. Or, maybe it’s [...]
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 [...]