Posts filed under “today’s thoughts”
Timing matters when you try to charge for news
Today I asked on Twitter: If you were going to start charging for a free, ad-supported product, would you pick one of the nation’s worst economic times to start? Well, would you? People are cutting back on spending right now. I don’t understand why now — besides desperation — makes sense for news orgs to [...]
Today’s Thought: Free-mium can work
The key to free-ium is making the free version kick ass, while making the premium version kick even more ass. You’ll never up-sell someone to premium if they free version is so crippled that it offers no value. We have to have two gears: useful and really useful.
Today’s Thought: Complacency is not an option
Complacency is a bridge to nowhere. I cannot tell you or your news organization exactly what to do. There is no magic bullet that will save floundering news organizations. But I can tell you that the status quo will end in failure. Innovation is ultimately what will save journalism. Innovation requires experimentation. Experimentation requires a [...]
Fire up the time machine – what would you do?
If you ran into yourself 10 years ago, what would you tell yourself about journalism? If you could go back 10 years and talk to your news organization’s editorial board and publisher, what would you tell them? Now take that advice and apply it to today. It’s only too late if we give up.
Today’s Thought: Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that newspapers suck on the Web
The lack of competitive online and mobile products from newspapers has left a huge opening for startups. And that’s good news for a lot of us. If you’re an entrepreneurial journalist, maybe you should be happy there is very little competition in the online landscape. Yes, I know that there are some companies like the [...]
Today’s Thought: No reason to ask if blogging is journalism
Asking if blogging is journalism is like asking if desktop publishing is journalism. The answer is sometimes. Both are just publishing platforms. Nothing more. Nothing less. At BeatBlogging.Org you’ll find many examples of journalists using blogging and other online tools to take their beat reporting to the next level. But most blogs are much truer [...]
Today’s Thought: Institutional memory and inertia
Are institutional memory and inertia killing the newspaper industry? After reading the comments on a myriad of posts from journalists stuck in the past, I can’t help but think that there is no future for newspapers as long as the majority of their staffs (editorial and business) — and their collective institutional memories — are [...]
Today’s Thought: The news hole
Can you imagine tailoring your reporting to fit a space dictated by a medium and not by the actual story? Unreal. Imagine a world in which you write as much or as little as needed. Have one photo to go with a story? Have 500? Want to link to other sites, documents, databases and content? [...]
Today’s Thought: Are the days of the metro newspaper officially numbered?
It was another crushing week of buyouts and layoffs at daily newspapers all over the country. The Palm Beach Post will be seeing almost half of its editorial positions slashed by the end of summer. The San Jose Mercury News will be down to 155 editorial employees by the end of the week from a [...]
Today’s Thought: You’re not born a digital native
Being a digital native is not about where you start off, but rather it’s about where you end up. So, when I say “Web natives need to lead Web operations,” I don’t just mean people who were born with laptops in their cribs. Anyone can become a digital native if they really want to. But [...]