What would artisanal news look like? I’d never heard this term until Dave Hendricks, who blogs at Attentionization, used it when he wrote about my post regarding what newspapers could learn from the decline in the ice harvesting business. (Read more about how he explains artisanal news in the comments on that post.) I like [...]
Some big news here at the Save the Media blog. Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab has asked me to throw some blog posts their way. I’m quite excited about it. The blog is a compilation of a variety of bloggers — one of whom now will be me — who write about the transformation in journalism, [...]
It appears the new era of paid online news is coming. Fast. The New York Times has been considering a monthly Web access fee. Rupert Murdoch has announced he’ll be charging for online content on News Corp. sites. The Boston Globe has told its union bosses it will start charging for Boston.com. Britain’s Financial Times, [...]
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 [...]
Peter Osnos proposes in Columbia Journalism Review that Google meter the news, helping to determine what percentage of payments should go to the creator of the content. He suggests this as a way to both help newspapers monetize on the Web and level the playing field, so the newspaper that produces a story that ends [...]
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 [...]
In my last post, I compared the current troubles in the newspapers business to the decline in ice harvesting. Today, my metaphor is sewing machines. Newspapers can learn a lot from them. I got the idea for the sewing machine metaphor from business blogger and Squidoo-founder Seth Godin . He blogged recently about the Singer sewing [...]
It almost seems you can’t read a journo blog these days without finding a metaphor or simile about the state of the news business. The news business has been compared to lemmings, railroads and, of course, the horse and buggy. (Read Nick Bergus’ post on the topic for an entertaining list of many such metaphorical comparisons.) People, including me, [...]
I'm Gina Masullo Chen, a 20-year veteran newspaper journalist who is a Ph.D. candidate in mass communications. I want to see journalism survive. I believe news organizations need to embrace new media, change their thinking, improve their content and innovate. Read more about me here. I also blog once in a while at Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab.
Follow me on twitter
