Save the Media

Just catching up some more on great stuff about the transformation of journalism: GrowthSpur: Mark Potts at Recovering Journalist is floating a new business, called GrowthSpur, aimed at helping local news sites have success. Potts, co-founder of the early but unsuccessful hyperlocal network Backfence, writes on his blog that GrowthSpur will help local sites get multiple revenue sources, [...]

I’ve spent the last 19 summers working at newspapers, so I know how lonely a newsroom can feel during the dog days of August. It often seems like half the staff in on vacation. News tends to slow, unless you count the spike in crime as the mercury and humidity climbs. This summer likely was even more [...]

Sometimes to look forward you need to look back, way back. Consider this:  Both recording information by writing and the telephone — two experiences ubiquitous today were once cause for a bit of alarm. Sound familiar? Just as some news organizations today bemoan the Internet and its ability to offer content for free and its [...]

A few short-takes of interesting finds around the blogosphere. Hope you find them useful. Be authentic: Sure, news organizations try to be authoritative, reliable and popular. But Ryan Sholin, director of news innovation at Publish2, writes at Invisible Inkling that authenticity is vital as news organizations try to engage their community in the social media [...]

Some short-takes of interesting stuff from around the blogosphere: Then & Now: Scooping the News has started a useful series. Each week the site is evaluating five newspapers with circulations of more than 100,000 on how much their Web sites have innovated since five years ago. I think it’s an important exercise because as the [...]

A colleague and friend, Darren Sanefski, has started a new design blog, called Blogging Gestalt Design, and he was asking for some advice on how to get started, what to do on his blog, how to get it noticed. I thought I’d answer him in the form of a blog post because his questions are [...]

If you’ve been on Twitter or pretty much anywhere online in the recent past , you’ve learned that Twitter has been playing a key role in allowing news about the contentious presidential election in Iran to be spread throughout the world. What’s notable is many doing the reporting are regular folks, not journalists, and the [...]

Time for some short-takes, thoughtful ideas from across the blogosphere: Media companies of the future: Chris Brogan, a new media marketing consultant, came up with his idea of what the next media company would look like, starting from scratch. I like his ideas, especially: Everything is modular and linkable. Everything is fluid. Meaning, if I want [...]

First,  a personal note. Sorry, I haven’t been blogging for a while. I’ve been quite ill, with a suspected case of swine flu. (I say “suspected” because at least in my community, doctors are only giving the “swine flu” test to hospitalized patients, which, thankfully, I was not.) I am starting to feel better now. I [...]

In my last post, I suggested the idea of hyperinterest — basically topic pages on newspaper Web sites that would aggregate and curate the best of the Web for readers. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this idea, and — in part prompted by your insightful comments — I’ve added some flesh to [...]