Steve Buttry has a terrific post up about the importance of news organizations having a smart mobile strategy, and makes the excellent point that just as traditional organizations are finally learning to be Web-first, they may need to quickly become mobile-first.
"Mobile first” needs to change how we think and [...]
The latest harebrained scheme to save the news business is for a bunch of publishers to cut their content off from Google searches and give Microsoft's Bing exclusive search-engine access to their news.
Good luck with that. Aside from the sheer egotistic insanity of it—do proponents Rupert Murdoch and [...]
Old habits die hard. And that's one of the things that's made it very tough for newsrooms to adapt to the online age. There are hoary, industrial-age ways of doing journalism that just don't make sense anymore, but they still go on, leading to silly inefficiencies even in newsrooms that [...]
Newsosaur Alan Mutter calls the double-digit drop in the latest newspaper circulation figures "devastating." Content Bridges' Ken Doctor's adjective of choice is "breathtaking." Poynter's Rick Edmonds goes with "extraordinary."
Meanwhile, at the San Francisco Chronicle, whose 25.8 percent daily circulation drop over the past year was [...]
Twitter can be maddening in many ways, a cacophony of voices with a lousy signal-to-noise ratio—does anybody really care what somebody else had for breakfast?
But one thing that Twitter excels in is breaking news. Its broadcast, real-time, 140-character headline nature makes it a perfect vehicle for the latest news, [...]
I haven't blogged much lately because, well, I got tired of repeating myself. How much more can be said about how the media landscape is changing, and how traditional media companies are missing the boat? At this point it seems better to just let the situation play out. So I've [...]
Tip for media sites: If you start a new feature, be sure to lock up the URL for it before you launch it. That prevents domain squatters from grabbing away the newly named feature's Web address, and that in turn makes it harder to defend a trademark or to promote [...]
Tip for media sites: If you start a new feature, be sure to lock up the URL for it before you launch it. That prevents domain squatters from grabbing away the newly named feature's Web address, and that in turn makes it harder to defend a trademark or to promote [...]
Millions of words have been spilled over the past couple of years about what's wrong in the news business (many of them on this blog). But if you want to read a few thousand words that explain the state of play with superb clarity and brutal frankness, check out Bill [...]
I've written before about the crazy phenomenon in which newspapers send waves of staffers to cover sports events or political conventions. This happens regardless of whether those staffers truly add much to readers' understanding of events that are being widely covered elsewhere (not to mention available on live TV [...]
As much time as I spend on Recovering Journalist railing against the problems and failings of traditional media, I spend far more time away from the blog trying to come up with solutions and thinking about What Comes Next. That’s the main reason why I’ve been posting less frequently lately: [...]
So much has happened in the media industry lately that's it's sometimes hard to remember that just two years ago there was so much fretting over Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of the Wall Street Journal. There were fears that Murdoch would corrupt the Journal to support his own political interests [...]
With the passing of Walter Cronkite, it will be interesting to see if there's a media frenzy that's anything like the over-the-top orgy of coverage and tributes the accompanied Tim Russert's death last summer. Cronkite was 10 times the journalist and historic figure that Russert was. But I suspect [...]
There's been a nagging suspicion in many enlightened journalistic quarters that the Michael Jackson story has been massively overplayed in the media, especially by TV news (even NBC Nightly News led with the story most nights last week, which was ridiculous).
It was quite apparent that Baby Boomer media managers—out [...]Two weeks ago, The New York Times pissed off its many acrostic puzzle fans—including myself—by omitting the biweekly acrostic from the printed Times Sunday Magazine. This shortsighted budget-cutting move was inspired by a reduction in the magazine's page size, which led to a decision to print the paper's weekly [...]
It's a dirty little secret that what journalists think is important in a newspaper isn't always the same sorts of things that readers find essential. Transfer the city hall reporter or lose an investigative star to another paper, and readers may barely notice. But try messing with the TV grid [...]
Tribune Co. is in bankruptcy. So are the owners of the Chicago Sun-Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, Minneapolis Star Tribune, New Haven Register and many smaller newspapers. McClatchy is trying to refinance its debt. The New York Times Co. is struggling [...]
Nothing really new here, except that the numbers are becoming overwhelming: a new Zogby poll finds that most Americans prefer the Internet as a news source—more so than newspapers, TV and radio combined. Oh, and they consider the Internet more reliable than those other media, as well.
As if that [...]Just as it was stupid to paste a newspaper onto a computer screen, it's dumb to assume that what works on the Web works on a cellphone screen. They're very different.
In the first part of this two-part post, I described the explosive growth in the delivery of news and [...]
The Daily Show's skewering of the newspaper business in general and The New York Times in particular was spectacular. Highlight—though some might not see it exactly that way: Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones asking Timesman Rick Berke to point out one thing in the "aged news" print newspaper that' [...]
There's something I've said in passing in a couple of posts and comments recently—and in any number of offline conversations—that bears highlighting: I believe that Yelp is doing the kind of fundamental damage to newspapers' traditional local entertainment listing and reviewing role that craigslist did to classifieds.
I'm not [...]Maybe you have to get out of the newspaper business to get the proper perspective on everything that's wrong with it. Or maybe John Temple knew all along, but just couldn't push the boulder far enough up the hill as president and editor of the Rocky Mountain News.
Either way, four [...]Jeff Jarvis, poking around lately in the post-modern world of advertising, has hit upon a scary thought: What if, basically, advertisers don't need media to reach audiences? What if advertising, as we know it, is irrevocably, irretrievably broken?
Jeff writes:So here's the real punchline: Advertising ends up having nothing to do [...]
Capturing the frustration with much of the leadership of the newspaper business that boils over in so many of us, Dan at the always interesting Xark blog lets loose on what he calls the "ritual suicide pact" of publishers who think people will pay to read newspaper Web sites. This [...]
One of the best things that can happen to a newspaper is when its readers start feeling like they own it. They become so bound up in the paper that they take offense at any effort to change it or reduce it. That's real customer loyalty.
One of the worst things [...]Essential reading: Robert Niles on OJR, channeling search-engine optimization expert Danny Sullivan, lists 10 things news sites should do to improve their standings in search results. It's aimed at start-ups, but it's good advice for any site.
I've written about this before—it's just mind-boggling that most news sites [...]Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Owner/Publisher Walter E. Hussman Jr. says his phone is ringing off the hook. Angry readers? Peeved subscribers?
Nope: Other publishers.
They want to know how Hussman is managing to charge subscription fees for access to the Democrat-Gazette Web site, which he owns and publishes. In the midst of [...]Another good read: Jack Shafer of Slate, once again, reaches back into history to draw parallels with today. This time, he revisits the Great New York Newspaper Strike of 1962-63.
Journalists and publishers improvised, and readers, parched for news, features, entertainment, and advertising, experimented with finding new sources. Giving up [...]
It's hard to keep up with everything worth reading about the state of the journalism business, but here are a couple of good ones I found today.
First, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus, writing in CJR, surfaces some unpleasant truths about what's wrong with journalism today (he gets fuzzier [...]The news about the newspaper business is bad. Circulation is sliding. Revenue is plummeting. Papers are closing. Layoffs abound.
Amid the chaos, far too many in the industry are paralyzed by fear. Their idea of innovation is a token, tentative project here or there. Or a foolhardy call to charge for [...]It's hard not to look at the latest newspaper circulation numbers and gasp a little bit. Yeah, the economy is bad, yeah, readers are shifting to the Internet (though not necessarily newspaper sites on the Internet), but this latest round of double-digit drops among the nation's largest papers is [...]
While everybody's patting themselves on the back today over the Pulitzers' look at journalism's past, news industry "scourge" Google is once again inventing journalism's future. Take a gander at the newest toy out of Google Labs, the Google News Timeline:
There are those of us who remain a bit skeptical of Twitter's mainstream appeal, partly because of incerasingly loud whispers that nobody under 25 seems to use it (a key metric for an allegedly hot online service) and partly because of a feeling that it has a particularly rabid following [...]
Amid the news industry's crisis and the attendant fingerpointing over the causes, there is seemingly endless discussion these days of the pros and cons of things like micropayments, pay walls, aggregators, Google and the like.
"We're being ripped off by Google and the aggregators," say the traditionalists. [...]Advertisers are hurting. Newspapers are hurting. And so, by working our way down (up?) the value chain, we get to the people who supply newsprint to newspapers:
AbitibiBowater, the largest newsprint producer in North America, has filed for bankruptcy protection.It's earnings season on Wall Street, which means we're finding out just how bad the first quarter of 2009 was for newspaper publishers and other media companies.
It was bad. Very bad.Just saw this in my Yahoo Entertainment AP RSS feed, timestamped 9:48 pm EDT:
AP - Advisory: The NASA Colbert story is embargoed until 11:10 p.m. EDT and will be resent at that time.
Oops. Because this appeared in my Yahoo Entertainment AP RSS feed at 8:11 pm EDT:NEW YORK – One [...]
So Steven Brill, Gordon Crovitz and some other big names have decided to step up and create the dinosaur's dream: a mechanism that will allow newspaper sites to hide their online content behind paid subscription walls. It even has micropayments!
Good luck with that.There's not a lot of point [...]Sometimes technological change sort of creeps up on you, and you find yourself one day doing something very differently—and having done so for a long time—without realizing you'd shifted your behavior.
Consider, say, telephones in hotels. A few years ago, hotels were festooned with pay phones (much-beloved by reporters covering hotel-based [...]The whispers had been growing ever louder in certain media circles in recent weeks: The Boston Globe was in deep trouble. The New York Times Co. was frantically looking for a buyer—and would even pay somebody to take the Globe off its hands. The paper's book value had fallen to [...]
I ran the back-of-the-envelope calculations on converting a news site from free to subscription-based in this space a month ago, and found the notion wanting, to say the least. Now along come Martin Langeveld, reaching the same conclusion with even better calculations, and Jeff Mignon and Nancy Wang, [...]
These are tough times for editors. Senior editors are being forced to make deep, painful cuts in their newsrooms. Assignment editors are being phased out at some papers, seen as extraneous layers in the production process. Copy editors are seeing their jobs consolidated or even outsourced. And many reporters, by [...]
A friend who came into the newspaper business several years ago from a career in broadcast media was surprised at the poor quality of the newspaper business' trade press, compared to other industries. Ironically, the journalism industry just didn't seem able to support decent trade magazine coverage of itself.
But [...]I really hesitate to bring this up, because it seems to be firmly in the realm of the unthinkable. But could we be looking at the near-term demise of The New York Times, at least as we know it?
This sort of speculation cropped up earlier this year, in a provocative [...]There's plenty of excellent commentary challenging Sen. Benjamin Cardin's proposal to give non-profit status for newspapers, and there's not a whole lot I can add. But I'll contribute this sardonic line from a publisher I talked to recently: "What's the point? We're already non-profit."
And that's the [...]Newspapers have enough problems right now without trying to deliberately (as opposed to accidentally) cripple their Web businesses. But Newsday is going to try.
As you may have heard, Newsday is going to be the first big daily to try to hide its online content behind a pay wall. [...]
The bad news: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer publishes its last print edition tomorrow. The good news: Hearst, after needless dilly-dallying over what should have been a fairly obvious decision, has announced that it will continue SeattlePI.com as "the leading news and information portal in the region."
Hearst Newspapers President [...]If you bought a copy of the national edition of the Sunday New York Times this weekend, guess what? That $5 newspaper cost more than one share of New York Times Co. stock, which closed on Friday at $4.25. (The New York edition of the paper is $4.)
That's just one [...]This excellent post by Clay Shirky about the mess newspapers are in—and the compound leadership, vision and business failures that helped get them there—is all over the place today, but in case you haven't read it, it's really good.
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people [...]
Martin Nisenholtz, The New York Times' terrific SVP-digital operations, has some interesting things to say about journalism education in his weeklong Q&A session with readers on NYTimes.com. It's not just journalism courses that J-students should be taking, Nisenholtz says:
With respect to skills, I advise journalists coming out of school today [...]
There's an interesting comment on one of my previous Recovering Journalist: What Will Happen When the Presses Go Silent?posts that I want to highlight and address more broadly than just the back and forth of comments.
A commenter named Dave wrote:No contradicting your main point that papers fumbled the Web. [...]
Hearst's handling of the situation at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is increasingly bizarre. And that may be too kind a word. Despicable and cruel may be more like it. The company seems completely unable to decide whether to turn the P-I into a revolutionary online-only operation or simply close it [...]
Time magazine predicts the next 10 papers to fold or go all-digital:
Philadelphia Daily News Minneapolis Star-Tribune Miami Herald Detroit News Boston Globe San Francisco Chronicle Chicago Sun-Times New York Daily News Ft. Worth Star Telegram Cleveland Plain Dealer Not a whole lot of surprises; the more interesting question may be which papers should be on the deadpool [...]According to the excellent (if depressing) PaperCuts newspaper layoffs tracker, more than 20,000 jobs have been cut from American newspapers since the beginning of 2008—more than 3,500 in the past two months. That quickening trend is going to continue as the industry's spiral worsens and more newsrooms are cut back [...]
The Cedar Rapids Gazette boldly leaps into the (very near) future. It's not without very tough choices, but it also includes some slick (though unfortunately now dormant) experimentation. Steve Buttry has mutated from editor into "information content conductor" and is blogging about it. And smart guy Chuck [...]
A couple of smart reads today on what people should be thinking about when they think about online news—and one not-so-smart one:
My pal Jim Brady, former executive editor at Washingtonpost.com, in a wide-ranging Q&A at Poynter on the state of online news:I think the level of experimentation has increased [...]
I never knew or had the privilege of working for Jim Bellows, but I was fortunate to be a regular reader of his mid-'70s Washington Star and became a total fan. He was the kind of newspaper editor they just don't make anymore, a bold, creative, aggressive leader [...]
Out of the wreckage of the Rocky Mountain News comes news that new Web sites are sprouting in Denver, featuring the work of former Rocky staffers who have gone out on their own. Good for them.
A group of former RMN sportswriters has started Inside The Rockies, [...]There's a reason why most journalists–including myself–were liberal arts majors. It's because, well, as Barbie once said, "Math class is tough."
But some of us became business reporters and learned to read balance sheets and other financial statements. A few of us moved from journalism to the business side of [...]A Congressman–a Democratic Congressman, at that–has given public voice to something a lot of journalists don't want to know about or talk about: A large number of people are actively rooting for newspapers and other media to die horrible deaths.
Rep. Jared Polis (D.-Colo.) said this about the closing of the [...]It's been a while since I checked up on the status of the various attempts to find buyers for newspapers. In the wake of the Rocky Mountain News' ignominious end when its owner, Scripps, was unable to find a buyer—and with other major papers threatened with the same [...]
A Canadian professor of business and financial journalism–and that's a discipline U.S. journalism schools could use a lot more of–named Christopher Waddell has a very interesting point about the raft of corporate failures we're seeing in the media business. He argues that it turns out that the very concentration of [...]
Amazingly, Amazon has backed down on implementing the text-to-speech feature of the latest Kindle (the one that Roy Blount Jr. and the Authors Guild were so upset about). Since this feature acts on a copy of the book the customer has already purchased, I really fail to [...]
The ASNE has canceled its 2009 convention in Chicago. How symbolic. With newsroom budgets slammed, getting editors to travel out of town for their annual gathering doubtless became impossible. ASNE hopes to be able to hold its 2010 convention as scheduled. But who knows how many newspapers will be left [...]
OK, who had the San Francisco Chronicle in the daily newspaper dead pool?
Probably everybody.Philadelphia Media Holdings, publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection tonight, after failing to reach a new financing agreement with its lenders. The company was several months behind on its debt payments.
PMH is a former client, and I have many [...]I hope you'll forward this post to someone.
How many Web stories do you forward a day? Several, probably. We do it all the time: Pasting a link (or an entire story) into e-mail, using a site's "send this to a friend" function, dropping a link into Twitter or Facebook. It's [...]In the wake of The New York Times Co.'s odd settlement of its dispute with Gatehouse Media over linking, another case has turned up in which links by a news site to another site was challenged–and settled almost as strangely.
Slate reports that BlockShopper, a small real estate [...]The latest harebrained idea for saving newspapers–is it February cabin fever that's bringing all of this out?–is a couple of different proposals that newspapers and maybe the AP go on strike for a few days to show everybody just how vital and important and essential they are.
Yeah, right.
