Save the Media

Tweet 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 [...]

Tweet 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 [...]

Tweet 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 [...]

Tweet 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. [...]

Tweet Imagine a news Web site that’s a portal to everything people used to read in newspapers plus a bunch of things that newspapers were never able to provide. A cool idea, I think, but first it requires newspapers to embrace two provocative ideas: The mass audience is dead. The product of newspaper Web sites [...]

Tweet Seems like it’s a good time for some short takes from my jaunts around the blogosphere. Here are some posts that I found interesting. Hope you will, too. Is news like bottled water? Tim Windsor has a thought-provoking post at Nieman Journalism Lab today, noting that bottled-water producers know something newspapers do not: How [...]

Tweet If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times: “Well, I don’t get how Twitter can help me because I’m only one person and only have so many followers?” I heard this common lament again this week, and rather than get exasperated, I figured it was time for another explanation of how [...]

Tweet Well, now that I’ve discussed The Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones Co.’s  rules for social media to death, it’s time to take a peek at other newspapers’ policies. (Hats off to Steve Buttry for a post that alerted me to The New York Times’ and The Washington Post’s policies.) The New York Times: The New [...]

Tweet Updated: Be sure to check the links at bottom of post to other voices on this issue. This is an open letter to the Dow Jones and Co. in response to the rules it released to its staff at The Wall Street Journal and its other publications on how to use — or not use [...]

Tweet Here are some short-takes of  journalism-related finds from around the blogosophere: Targeted traffic: In some ways the old days of ignorance were bliss. You wrote a story. You assumed people read it. You were happy. Now, thanks to stats on blogs and online stories, you can find out how many (or few) people are [...]