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.
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 willingness to fail.
But unlike the failure that the status quo will bring on, experimentation is a momentary feat of failure. It’s losing a battle, not the war. Doing nothing will cause us to lose the war.
Rather, each time we experiment and we fail, we must pick ourselves back up and try again. We must learn. And we must never gave up.
The path to salvation is littered with many pit falls. It’s a hard, winding road that will only reward the most dogged of journalists and innovators. But it is our only choice.
So, I ask you, what are you doing to innovate? How will you navigate that path to salvation?
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.
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 Las Vegas Sun, Lawrence Journal-World, Washington Post, New York Times and some others doing innovative things online, but the vast majority of newspapers have craptastic Web sites.
Small community papers should be most afraid. These are often the papers with the worst Web sites (some don’t have any and many have barely functional ones). They rarely have good archives, almost never allow comments and discussion and many don’t update in-between print editions.
Plus, the barriers to entry for doing small-town journalism (be it offline or online) are much lower. A basic WordPress installation would be much better than most small-town newspapers’ Web sites.
Someone is going to benefit from the poor effort that most newspapers are putting online. This is a perfect opportunity for entrepreneurs to move in and defeat a weak enemy and give people a better product at the same time.
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 to the original “Web log” concept than actual platforms for journalism.
Most bloggers just want to share their thoughts, feelings and lives with the world. Some, however, use blogging to take their beat reporting to the next level.
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 still around. Every change that is proposed, every new idea that is thought of, every staff cut that is made, is always compared to the old way of doing things.
The problem is that the old way of doing things for newspapers shares nothing in common with what 21st-century journalism is shaping up to be. What we are seeing is not a major change for the newspaper industry. It is a monumental rethinking of everything that newspapers have ever done.
This isn’t going from gas-powered cars to fuel cells. This is more akin to colonizing space.
And if you’re not prepared to colonize space, get the hell out of the way.
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?
That’s the power of the Web. That’s the power of blogging your beat.
The beat blog killed the news hole.
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 high of around 420. The Merc will have lost about 63% of its editorial staff.
Metro newspapers don’t really excel at anything, and in the era of niche publications, does that model still make sense? The Star-Ledger has found success with a niche publication, Pharmalot. Is that the model for metros to move forward?
John Hassell, the online editor at The Star-Ledger, said that he can envision a future where newspapers are a network of niche blogs like Pharmalot. That future makes more sense to me than the current metro newspaper model.
This all brings us to Today’s Thought: Are the days of the metro newspaper officially numbered?
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 it requires hard work. It requires an inquisitive mind. It’s about loving the Web, not about career advancement.
Being a digital native is not about a bunch of marketing buzzwords like Web 2.0. It’s about truly loving technology and always being willing to learn something new. It’s about the joy of it all.
I can spot an impostor from a mile away — the kind of person who believes that the Web is a great way to advance his career. Digital natives don’t need incentive. Digital natives understand that “the Web is the greatest thing to ever happen to journalism“.
Being a digital native is about mindset and culture. Digital natives never, ever long for the good, old days for journalism. Digital natives look forward to the bright future of journalism.
I know the best days are ahead for journalism.
Rob Curley has had an unofficial mission statement at the newspapers he has worked at: Build cool shit.
That’s the only way we are going to turn around the journalism industry. With that in mind, here is some cool Web journalism shit to check out:
