Save the Media

Well, readers. I feel a bit like Jeff Jarvis or Heather Armstrong today. Both of them are high-profile bloggers, who had customer-service nightmares that they took to the blogosphere and won. Jarvis, is a City University of New York journalism professor who blogs at BuzzMachine and had a heck of a time with a Dell [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 is [...]

Over the past two weeks, I’ve blogged about Jeff Jarvis’ book, “What Would Google Do?” as has my guest blogger, friend and colleague, Amber Smith. Both of us distilled ideas from the book, applying them to our experience at newspapers. This week, Google itself testified at a U.S. Senate Subcommittee that looked at the future [...]

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” — Albert Einstein When I read this Einstein quote (which was posted in an office at my kids’ elementary school), I thought: Wow! Einstein could have said this today about the newspaper industry. To me the quote sums up so much [...]

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about exactly what an online-first newsroom is. And I’ve come up with six points, although I don’t think that tells the whole story. So I sense another series coming on. In today’s post, I’ll discuss six attributes that form the foundation of an online-first newsroom.  Next post, [...]

Time for another Short Takes:  Five articles worth reading that relate to journalism as it transforms. Are staff cuts good news? That’s the provocative question Mathew Ingram asks at the Nieman Journalism Lab. This is the kind of post that can’t help but raise emotions. Pretty much anyone in journalism today knows someone who has [...]

One of the more interesting aspects of the interactive Web for journalists is the ability to connect with readers directly through social-networking sites. I really believe journalists have just begun to see the value of social networking as a reader-interaction, news-gathering and news-dissemination tool. In 10 years, I suspect, we’ll look back and wonder how [...]