OJR: The Online Journalism Review
November 6, 2009
By Dave Chase
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It is painful to watch the steady decline of newspapers. For some, I expect we're about to see the
dead cat bounce as the economy turns around. This will only delay the inevitable. The challenge they face at this late date is immense but surmountable.
Their near death experience is similar to what Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) and IBM faced. Only IBM remains a blue chip market leader. However, IBM completely reinvented itself from a "big iron" mainframe and minicomputer driven company to the market leader in I.T. related services. There were some valuable assets that they were able to leverage but it took an outsider like Lou Gerstner to make that wholesale change happen.
Meanwhile, the vanguard company of the minicomputer era (DEC) wasn't able to make that shift and sold at a deep discount to Compaq (who in turn was bought by HP). It's important to recognize that IBM and DEC were in highly competitive markets. DEC along with countless other mainframe and minicomputer companies were unable to transform themselves and are mere footnotes of history. In contrast, the newspapers have largely operated in non-competitive markets by comparison. It will take a true newspaper leader and visionary to make this happen as opposed to someone just milking the cash cow until it withers and dies.
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More about: management, news history
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November 3, 2009
By Eric Ulken
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I'm not ashamed to admit it: The first time I saw
Twitter, I thought, "What's the point?" Maybe you did too, or maybe you're just more perceptive than I am. Even Twitter's founders have said they didn't know exactly what it was when they started working on it. (
Biz Stone: "If anything we sort of thought it a waste of time.")
For every Twitter enthusiast, there was, I suspect, a point of realization that this thing could actually be incredibly useful. Some have cited the plane-in-the-Hudson story as their aha! moment. For me, it was less of a moment and more of a gradual understanding. I began to see its potential as a real-time information source when I first learned of a few important news items -- both big international stories and news of a more personal nature -- through Twitter.
I began following like-minded people for the interesting links they would post. Before long, information overload took hold. I tried to cull my follow list so I could read everything. I worried I would miss something. Finally, I learned to embrace the firehose and not try to process the whole stream.
But still I thought there must be a better way to separate signal from noise. And then I noticed that the most interesting and important items were appearing maybe three or four times in my Twitter feed. Since then, I've wished for a way to mine my feed for those links.
Last week I heard about TwitterTim.es and was thrilled to find it does exactly what I wanted. I spoke with Maxim Grinev, the project's technical lead, about TwitterTim.es and where it's headed.
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More about: news personalization, social media, Twitter
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October 29, 2009
By Robert Niles
7 comments | Archive Link
My post today is intended for students, mid-career journalists or anyone else thinking about starting an online news site, but without the faintest idea of how to start.
Here is your guide and checklist.
Now, I'm assuming that you already know how to report and how to write. I'm not covering that. Nor will I be getting into more advanced issues surrounding how to manage a business that includes contractors, freelancers and employees. Those are topics for other days. Today's post simply provides a check-list of technical tools that you'll need to get a basic, one-person news site on the Web, to lay a foundation for future expansion and success.
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More about: entrepreneurial journalism, revenue, tools
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October 28, 2009
By Robert Niles
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With print newspaper circulations crashing faster than the reality-TV hopes of
Balloon Boy's family, you could forgive newsroom managers for chasing every available source of new readers. For many online publishers, affiliated with newspapers or not, the Holy Grail of traffic is inclusion in the
Google News index.
Get in Google News, and links to your stories will be e-mailed to millions of Google's news alert subscribers, whenever your stories hit the right keywords. Post a hot story quickly, and you could end up on Google News' highly clicked front page.
But is inclusion in that index or other search engines' news indices really worthwhile for the majority of online news publishers? I'm going to argue... no. (Well, at least it's not worth making a fuss over.)
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More about: Google News, promotion, search engine optimization, social media
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October 23, 2009
By Tom Grubisich
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The new report
"The Reconstruction of American Journalism" by Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson is one more example of what what's wrong with the debate about the future of journalism. The Columbia Journalism School-sponsored report shovels out overviews, conclusions and recommendations by the pound, but with barely a few grams' worth of critical thinking. Jan Schaffer, in her reaction to Downie and Schudson, said it best:
"Darts for the mile-high, inch-deep reportage." Schaffer, who is executive director of American University's
J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism and Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter and business editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, zeroes in on the report's fatal weakness:
"If we really want to reconstruct American journalism, we need to look at more than the supply side; we need to explore the demand side, too. We need to start paying attention to the trail of clues in the new media ecosystem and follow those 'breadcrumbs.' What ailing industry would look for a fix that only thinks of 'us,' the news suppliers, and not 'them,' the news consumers? I don't hear from any of those consumers in this report."
Alan D. Mutter, whose Reflections of a Newsosaur blog, provides a good share of the small amount of rigorous, economic-centered thinking that's gone into the journalism crisis, also gave a mostly scathing review to "The Reconstruction of American Journalism."
Downie and Schudson come to their drastic recommendation of a "National Fund for Local News" using the kind of sleeves-rolled-up but shallow analysis that typically informs newspaper editorials on big issues (e.g., health care reform and the U.S. role in Afghanistan)
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More about: business models, entrepreneurial journalism, news history, newsroom convergence
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