Save the Media

Today I’m handing my blog over to veteran journalist and blogger Amber Smith, a friend and former colleague of mine at The Post-Standard in Syracuse. In her free time, she blogs about dementia at DementiAwareness. She offers some thoughtful lessons for journalists trying to navigate the changing world of media. It’s a new world “out [...]

Quill online, of the Society of Professional Journalists, released its list of 20 “industry thinkers, innovators, and practitioners” to follow, and I’m humbled and honored to be one of them. But what’s way more important that my tiny moment of fame is the list itself. It’s chock full of folks I want to know more [...]

Dear neglected blog readers, I’m sorry I’ve been ignoring you. But I do have some tidbits that are worth a read: Q and A with Steve Buttry: Brian Cubbison features an interview with Buttry on his blog this week that’s truly worth a read. (Full disclosure, Brian is a friend and former colleague; Buttry is a “virtual” [...]

A concept that gets bandied about a great deal is that news organizations need to help people “make sense of the world.”  I’ve used the idea myself to show how news organizations need to realize they sell convenience, not news. We all kind of know what we mean by this concept, but it doesn’t have a [...]

Here are some good posts for journalists – or anyone interested in the changing face of media – to read from my surfing around the blogosphere: Why less is not more:  A post by internet marketing consultant Chris Garrett offers some sage advice on social media use.  In essence, he sayd, for it to work, you have to [...]

As journalism evolves, re-invents, whichever action verb you’d like, I think we need to pay more attention to how news gathering is changing — or should be changing. Yes, crowdsourcing — when a news organization uses a large group of regular folks to report a story — gets a lot of ink, but I’m not [...]

Time for some short-takes of cool journalism-related stuff you should be reading around the blogosphere: Social media goes mainstream: So finally, being on social media has stopped being gee whiz and started being, well, normal. Manish Mehtma sums this point up well in this Huffington Post blog item. He notes that this process of normalizing [...]

The legacy press or the traditional media or whatever we’re calling newspapers these days has one main challenge for 2010. And it’s not finding a new business model, although, of course, that’s important, too. But the main challenge has nothing to do with business plans. It has to do with vision. It has to do [...]

Happy 2010, readers! Wow. We survived what was quite the troubling year in journalism, and, I think, really, that journalism is better for it. Yes, there’s been too many layoffs, pay cuts, buyouts. But I think the economic woes have forced news organizations to rethink how they gather and deliver news — and that’s a [...]

I can hardly believe it has been more than a year since I started this blog. Back in those early days, I had hardly any readers. I was writing for myself, but bit by bit some of you started to read. I thank all of you for that. I appreciate your comments, your interest in [...]