If you’ve read my columns or blog lately, you’ll know that I’m not a fan of forcing web users to pay for news content. (See previous blog item posted earlier today.) I DO want people to pay news companies to support the important journalism that they do, but the [...]
Over at the increasingly wonderful Neiman Journalism Lab blog, Zachery Seward has published a transcript of his interview with Journalism Online founder Steven Brill. (If you prefer you can listen to the 23-minute audio interview included with the article.) JO, as most of you know, is an attempt [...]
I’m on record as being opposed to charging for generic news content (including locally reported stories) on newspaper websites. I covered that in my last Editor & Publisher Online column, where I also outlined an alternative strategy to supplement weak online ad revenues. I also liked Steve Buttry’s “[...]
This has happened a few times (including recently), and it’s become a pet peeve that I need to get off my chest. As I occasionally do digital-media consulting work for media companies, or bid on consulting jobs, it’s not uncommon to be asked after presenting a new idea: “Has anyone [...]
Hint: It’s the leadership and corporate culture!
Check out this video of Google CEO Eric Schmidt being interviewed for WashingtonPost.com’s “On Leadership” series by Steven Pearlstein:
Wow. I hadn’t heard Schmidt talk about the Google corporate culture before, but watching this video interview made me realize why his company is so successful, [...]
My May Editor & Publisher Online column was published today — “Getting Money from Readers Who Won’t Pay for Online News” — and it’s mostly getting positive reviews so far. I make the case against daily newspapers’ shift toward charging for local news on their websites, and suggest an [...]
In this Denver Post story about parent company MediaNews Group’s new plan to charge for online news content, there’s an informal online poll. The results aren’t pretty for MNG.
I’m quoted as the dissenting voice in this piece by reporter Andy Vuong, but it’s a tiny clip and he [...]
An alert listener of Colorado Public Radio heard my interview last week on the “Colorado Matters” program, and noted that I erred in citing ProPublica, the independent investigative reporting website, as “ProPublica.com.” Well, I can’t very well fix my recorded radio voice to the correct ProPublica.org, but I’ll [...]
If you’ve been to a media conference lately, you know that it’s increasingly common for audience members to be posting to Twitter during speeches and panels. At the Online Journalism Symposium at the University of Texas recently, during a panel I was chairing, not only were some audience members tweeting [...]
I have a new, complimentary subscription to Field & Stream magazine (print edition). Why is that? Since I don’t fish or hunt, or have any interest whatsoever in reading about either, publisher Bonnier is wasting money by granting me an unasked-for 1-year subscription.
I’m thinking this started with my paid subscriptions [...]
Yeah, I’ve been playing hooky quite a bit lately. In the previous couple weeks I’ve mountain biked 4 days on Utah’s famed White Rim Trail, then succumbed to an invitation from a friend to drive to southwestern Colorado and ride some great trails near Cortez and Durango for 2 days. [...]
So on Wednesday, Amazon will be introducing a larger Kindle e-reading device. I’ll be away from the Internet on my mountain bike in southwestern Colorado so will probably miss the announcement. But I can’t help but ponder the significance of the advancement of the portable e-reader.
While I do believe [...]
A reader of one of my recent Editor & Publisher Online columns takes me to task for using “digital” rather than “online” to describe what we used to call “new media.” He prefers “online” as more accurate.
Actually, I’ve shifted my word usage to “digital media” on purpose, and think I’m [...]
I’ve tried to make the case in the last couple of blog posts that it’s in Google’s interest to share ad revenues with news providers, by opening up Google News fully to advertising and offering a story-clickthrough-based rev-share program for participating publishers tracked by the service. Without [...]
What goes around, comes around. … Sometimes when you’re having trouble coming up with a solution to a difficult problem, it helps to turn things upside down and get a new perspective.
I’d like to see the newspaper industry, especially the big metro dailies which are in the most trouble and [...]
I was disappointed in Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote speech to the Newspaper Association of America today. (Audio here, courtesy of Bill Densmore. Transcript of Q&A portion of Schmidt’s session, thanks to Poynter.org.) Oh, it was a fine speech and Schmidt educated some of the backward-thinking publishers in [...]
My latest (”March”) Editor & Publisher Online column was published today:
Can Former Newspaper Employees Invent a Brave New News Model?
This is actually my March column because I ran into an odd situation that held up publication till today. Mid-March, I interviewed Ron James, founder and publisher/executive editor of [...]
In case you missed it, Stephen Colbert interviewed NAA president John Sturm on Tuesday night’s Colbert Report. Enjoy!
The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Better Know a Lobby - Newspaper Lobby comedycentral.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest [...]
Take heart, newspaper aficionados and media curmudgeons. You’ll still have the comfort of the printed newspaper as you travel in space in the year 2259! (Well, that assumes you’ll be getting cryogenically frozen and are revived in a couple centuries.)
Credit my friend and colleague Christopher Ryan for [...]
Hmmm. InDenverTimes, the digital-only “replacement” for the dearly departed Rocky Mountain News, to be staffed by about 35 former Rocky journalists and funded by three non-publisher entrepreneurs, wants to get by on paid subscriptions (at least initially). If 50,000 noble people sign up for monthly subscriptions by April 23 [...]
Increasingly of late, I’m seeing writers use the term “hits” when talking about webpage usage. I’ve lost count of how often this has assaulted my ex-copy editor eyes, but it happened again in this story. An excerpt:
“Thousands of Seattlites will miss their morning ‘fish wrapper.’ But as other newspapers [...]
Over at ReinventingClassifieds.com, we have not given up on newspapers turning those downward-and-steepening revenue trend lines back upward.
Christopher Ryan, president of FutureofNews.com, and I have written a Classifieds Manifesto with some solid solutions for revolutionizing newspaper classifieds.
If you are involved in newspaper classifieds, are in a [...]
Last night I was reminded of the power that digital media have of bringing people together. My wife and I attended a birthday party for our friend, Bud, who chose the occasion to hold the debut public concert for his basement band, tentatively called “Doc Hollywood.” He rented the [...]
A poignant video goodbye from Rocky Mountain News staff. If you love(d) newspapers, or grew up reading the Rocky as I did, it’ll bring a tear to your eye. The staff did a great job on it. Personally, I’m feeling a combination of sadness and anger. The latter is because [...]
No, this post is not about religion, it’s about media and how to pay for online news.
So the debate rages on about “micropayments” for news and other techniques to get Internet users to pay for news content, so that newspapers and other news entities get a nice supplemental revenue stream [...]
My recent E&P column, “Forget Micropayments — Here’s a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content,” generated a ton of conversation, blog items, and mentions in news articles around the world. I’m pleased with that, because a wave had been building of (mostly older) prominent journalists and publishers recommending that [...]
My latest column is up at EditorandPublisher.com, and I suspect it will cause some debate:
Forget Micropayments — Here’s a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content
If you follow the media biz, you’ve surely seen the brouhaha over new calls from prominent journalists like Walter Isaacson and Steven Brill for news [...]
This strikes me as so funny and unusual, I have to blog it. … So earlier today I posted this to Twitter:
A short while later I notice that I’ve turned up on Columbia Journalism Review’s website on its “The Kicker” blog, where the (short) blog item is actually [...]
Ah, the irony. … I had a great conversation earlier today with a journalist recently laid off at a major U.S. regional paper. Of the more than 100 journalists laid off with him in recent months, he’s gathered about 40 of them together to create an online news service covering [...]
The new Journalism Now Podcast I mentioned previously is now online with podcast No. 1. The eight panelists (including me) and host David Stanton all introduce themselves for this first episode, then finally get into actually discussing some issues and predictions.
We’re all participating using Skype, and the audio and [...]
This afternoon I took part in the first-ever recording of the “Journalism Now Podcast,” which is a weekly online roundtable discussion covering “multimedia, data and social aspects of modern news.”
Podcast founder and host David Stanton, who teaches digital journalism at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications, [...]
My latest column for Editor & Publisher Online was posted this morning:
The All-Digital Newsroom of the Not-So-Distant Future
It’s my take on what a newspaper that’s decided to completely ditch its print edition but survive and reinvent itself as a digital-only local news entity will look like. I envision a [...]
It’s one of those thoughts I can’t believe hasn’t crossed my mind till now. (Though I’m certain it’s not original.) But I just noticed that lots of journalism schools at universities are still called the “School of Journalism and Mass Communication.”
Don’t you think it’s about time that they all [...]
This afternoon at 3:14 p.m., a few minutes after my daughter’s school ended for the day, I received this e-mail alert from the school’s principal:
“Dear Parents:
“An incident occurred today that we wanted to make you aware of. At around 12:45 p.m. the school received notice from BVSD that a threat [...]
I think this post by Robert Scoble today deserves a reading by all journalists: “Steve Jobs’ bad news heralds the real-time web age.” The A-list blogger was watching his Twitter and Friendfeed streams for news from people about the Steve Jobs announcement of the Apple CEO taking a medical [...]
Over on my site ReinventingClassifieds.com, we’ve just announced the winners of a couple Best Idea contests — one for media professionals and one for students. The idea for the contest was to tap the power of the crowd to come up with creative new ideas for reinvigorating newspaper classifieds [...]
Plenty of people have commented on David Carr’s piece in the New York Times, “Let’s Make an iTunes Model for News.” I’ll try not to repeat arguments already well made by others. (Rich Gordon has done a nice job refuting Carr’s ideas on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits; also see [...]
A couple stories in recent days remind us that the days of privacy are over.
Example 1: The naked upside-down skier
Surely you saw the story about the unfortunate man skiing with his son at the Vail resort in Colorado. There was a problem with the chairlift seat, and he [...]
My latest Editor & Publisher Online column is up: “Need to Make Profits Online? It CAN Be Done.”
It’s a follow-up to my previous E&P column, which advised newspaper CEOs on 11 key strategies to reinvent their enterprises. But since I didn’t focus so much on the money angle in [...]
One of my new favorite bloggers, Martin Langeveld, mentioned one of his favorite new bloggers, John Thornton and his Insomniactive, where the Texas venture capitalist spouts off smart opinion and analysis of the newspaper industry. Great stuff; add Insomniactive to your RSS reader if you care about newspapers.
I [...]
I’ve lost track of how many years I’ve blogged this, but it’s still good advice…
Remember to check your website or blog’s footer and change it to ©2009 tomorrow.
Sure, some systems are set to do this automatically, but MANY aren’t. I’m no longer shocked to see some website in June have [...]
Last night in Boulder (and not ending till this morning) we had one of our area’s famous windstorms. I saw reports of 80 to 90 mph wind gusts in some areas of the region. (I didn’t get much sleep last night due to the noise, as I’m sure was common [...]
If you’re in the news business and still think Twitter is silly and/or a waste of time, and of little consequence to journalism, this should wake you out of your stupor:
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Read his Twitter feed for a survivor’s experience of what he went through and saw — before [...]
OK, so yesterday I tossed up a 100% unscientific poll to see what you thought would happen with the Detroit and Denver newspaper situations. Since we now know what the Detroit decision was (Thurs-Fri-Sun home delivery with papers for sale on newsstands only on other days), here are the [...]
The speculation ended quickly enough. Detroit newspaper executives announced today their plan to (they hope) survive the industry crisis with two newspapers intact by implementing the following in spring 2009:
What an exciting (and yes, depressing) week it’s been in the newspaper business. The cities to watch right now are Denver and Detroit.
Denver: E.W. Scripps has put the Rocky Mountain News up for sale through mid January. No buyer: The Denver Post becomes Denver’s sole daily paper. Buyer: Who knows?
Detroit: [...]
I’m looking forward to Tuesday, when Detroit’s newspaper executives apparently will unveil a bold new plan to save themselves. As the Wall Street Journal reports, “the leading scenario set to be unveiled calls for the Free Press, the 20th largest U.S. newspaper by weekday circulation, and the News [...]
In a mostly complimentary review of my last E&P Online column, “My ‘Crisis’ Advice to Newspaper Company CEOs: 11 Points to Ponder,” the North Carolina Press Association Idea Bank blog (post written by “The Seeker”) referred to me this way:
“From the times I’ve read Outing’s columns, he doesn’t [...]
I love this post by the developer of an iPhone app called Runkeeper: “The power of social.” So, Runkeeper tracks your runs, hikes, bike rides, etc., and records not only a map of your route to view later, but also your performance. The iPhone sends the data of [...]
Outside Magazine, January 2009 print edition. (Ah, yes, in the age of instant digital news, we still get our print magazines dated weeks in the future!) On page 25 is a nice photo and brief story about professional climber Katie Brown. (Katie was editor of my defunct company’s YourClimbing.com [...]
Egads. It was painful reading through the reader comments on this column by Mike Littwin of the Rocky Mountain News, bemoaning the impending doom of his newspaper. (It seems highly unlikely that there’s a white knight in the Rocky’s future, which means it will probably shut down in early [...]
I’ve been writing columns and articles and doing research about the Internet and news media for a long time. A few columns over the years have been particularly well received; some landed with a dull thud; some attracted their share of criticism. Like many of my fellow industry pundits who [...]
Since the 50 newspaper company CEOs who attended the “Crisis Summit” hosted by the American Press Institute recently did not appear to have come out of that one-day session with The Answer to the industry’s woes, I took it upon myself to offer them some advice in my latest Editor [...]
As the father of two American girls, now ages 11 and 16, I get to watch the younger generation’s (digital) media habits up close, which is useful in my line of work as a media trend watcher.
Something I noticed some time ago with my teen daughter is that e-mail [...]
This morning I posted a few words to my Twitter account about PC Magazine’s decision to cease print publication…
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My Twitter posts also get fed automatically to my Facebook account, where Tom Regan, a smart and talented journalist and media thinker I know, posted what I thought was a profound [...]
The latest from the API Crisis Summit of 50 newspaper company CEOs: not much.
As Fitz and Jen at Editor & Publisher report: a conference call about the summit’s outcome was scheduled for today, but was canceled at the last minute. Jen quoted an e-mail from Mark Mulholland, associate [...]
OK, we have a little clarification about last Thursday’s behind-closed-doors American Press Institute Crisis Summit of 50 newspaper company CEOs. You’ll recall the brouhaha over an API staff summary of the 7-hour event, which concluded with, “Participants agreed to reconvene in six months, and to explore additional collaboration.” That [...]
After 50 newspaper company CEOs met behind closed doors at the American Press Institute on Thursday for their “Crisis Summit,” I was tempted to comment, but wanted to wait to see what would come out of the meeting. Would some participants write what transpired that day? The API staff did [...]
Here’s another gem sent to me by my new e-mail buddy, retired management consultant Frank Pecarich. (Here’s my earlier blog item featuring his graphical representation of change-resistant industries like U.S. automakers and newspapers.)
So below is what it would look like if newspaper companies actually adapted to changes in the [...]
The headline of this item was also the subject line of an e-mail I received today from Frank Pecarich, a retired management consultant who has been watching the newspaper industry lately with incredulity. In advance of this Thursday’s private summit of 50 newspaper company CEOs at the American Press [...]
I liked media consultant Alan Mutter’s latest blog item, “It’s time to rip the lid off,” in which he urges newspapers to get serious about doing hard-hitting journalism in order to save themselves.
His advice complements my thoughts as expressed in my most recent Editor & Publisher Online column.
Publishers, [...]
A reader of my latest Editor & Publisher Online column (about intelligently redesigning print editions to please older print loyalists and not go after younger people) asked:
“As newspaper companies redefine their strategies, will home delivery be a thing of the past? Will it be a premium service or only [...]
Sticking to the topic of “micro-personal news” (see previous blog item), John Paul Titlow wrote me the following note which responds to my September Editor & Publisher Online column, “Newspapers First Need to Redefine ‘News’ to Move Forward Online.” He makes some good points worth sharing, so with [...]
Interesting. I’ve been getting a new round of e-mail comments about the Editor & Publisher Online column I did back in late September: “Newspapers First Need to Redefine ‘News’ to Move Forward Online.” (My most current one is here.)
Also, Paul Gillin over at NewspaperDeathWatch.com did a blog item [...]
Even though most news websites now allow user comments, it still bugs me to see so little editorial staff participation in comment threads. Having editors and reporters take part and respond to reader comments is a powerful way to keep the discussion more focused and civil. Of course, it’s no [...]
Jay Small, writing on his Small Initiatives blog, comments on my latest Editor & Publisher Online column about how to smartly redesign print editions of newspapers.
One of the key points in my column is that newspapers need to provide MANY more refers and pointers to online and [...]
Here’s my latest Editor & Publisher Online column, posted today: “Don’t Redesign the Print Edition to Ensure Failure.”
It’s an opinion piece about how the wave of print-edition redesigns by the newspaper industry is largely missing the boat.
Publishers need to focus on their core older audience when it comes [...]
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The Boston Globe introduced a modest redesign of its print edition today. It’s nowhere near as dramatic as the recent redesigns by Tribune Co. papers, so the paper still looks like itself.
Kudos to whoever wrote the redesign FAQ. Sure, there’s the predictable “we’re improving the paper for [...]
I just got back from parents weekend at my 16-year-old daughter’s boarding school in New England. At the end of the program, the kids got kicked off campus for a couple days, so she and I traveled around the region until school reopened. It was a great opportunity to observe [...]
Does anyone know about current trends in newspaper racks? I ask because on Monday I was hanging out with my daughter in the impressive and recently renovated Natick Collection (a.k.a., Natick Mall) near Boston. I wanted a copy of the Boston papers, but couldn’t spot any newspaper racks.
I asked [...]
Here’s a little prediction that’s been spinning around my head lately. I’ll release it here on my blog to leave room in there for something else. 
As newspapers (especially the larger metros, which face the worst declines) continue to lose staff, lose ad revenues, and in [...]
As a cyclist and runner — and iPhone 3G owner — I’ve been eagerly trying out several new fitness trackers that utilize the iPhone’s built-in GPS to track the trails and routes I ride and run. Like a “real” GPS unit, they record speed, pace, distance, elevation gain and loss, [...]
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A colleague at the Chicago Tribune was kind enough to send me a few print copies of the newly redesigned paper. I’ve looked over many editions online, using both PressDisplay.com and the Chicago Tribune Electronic Edition for digital replicas of the print pages. But that online viewing just isn’t [...]
On LATimes.com today, Andrew Malcolm posted this on the site’s political blog: “After Sarah Palin VP debate, Joe Biden to step aside for Hillary Clinton?.” It’s a long analysis of an Internet rumor that, near as I can tell, has no solid basis for taking seriously. (See Snopes.com’s [...]
My latest column is up over at Editor & Publisher Online: “Newspapers First Need to Redefine ‘News’ to Move Forward Online.”
I’m very curious to see the reaction to this one, as I think I’m hitting some significant new ground. And if anyone can point me to examples of the [...]
I was tickled to find my name on Robert Scoble’s list of top tech blogger/FriendFeed/social media people. He’s got a huge following, so by appearing on his list, I’ll pick up some new followers on FriendFeed, Twitter and my blog, I’m sure. (I’ve noticed some already.)
Scoble is publishing the [...]
Over at ReinventingClassifieds.com we’ve got a couple competitions going on, both soliciting ideas for newspapers to help turn around their stumbling classifieds operations. While we have some good ideas (we think) for helping the situation — and we’ll roll them out in the months ahead — we don’t profess [...]
I’ve been playing around with exercise/trail tracking applications for the iPhone recently. All of them are weak, though I think it’s the phone’s GPS and not the software that’s mainly to blame. I hope that some day a smart phone will replace the need to carry a stand-alone GPS unit, [...]
Since John McCain has stated that he doesn’t know how to use a computer, his campaign’s reaction to someone hacking into running mate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo Mail account and spreading the contents around the web should come as no surprise. (It appears that the e-mails are legit.) His campaign manager, [...]
Lately, NYU journalism professor and Pressthink blogger Jay Rosen has been urging his Twitter followers (more than 1,600 of them) to point out examples of reporters “growing a spine” when it comes to pointing out and documenting untruths by the McCain presidential campaign.
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He’s asking Twitter users to include [...]
Whoa! Keyword and search marketing guru Dan Murray e-mailed me to note that one of my Twitter posts (aka, tweets) showed up in the top 5 in a Google search for “Palin neighbor“.
I don’t profess to understand how this happened, but it’s intriguing to learn that Google now [...]
This popped up in my ego filter: Colorado State University adjunct professor of journalism Jeff Browne assigned my old “11 Layers of Citizen Journalism” essay to students in his Online Writing and Journalism class. (It’s been a popular article over the years; I often see it on reading [...]
I love it. HugeURL.com takes a short URL and turns it into a long, complex one. Here’s the “better” URL for this blog.
I’ve been away for a few days, but when I got back I caught up on some episodes I’d missed of the Daily Show and Colbert Report during the Republican convention. Jon Stewart hit it particularly well by comparing past and recent statements by folks like Karl Rove [...]
So there’s this rumor starting to spread around the net: That GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin is not the mother of the infant Trig Palin as she claims; rather, the mother is actually her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol. It surfaced with this report on Daily Kos. (And there’s a [...]
This morning, on NPR’s Morning Edition, host Steve Inskeep interviewed former New York mayor and Republican presidential candidate Rudy Guiliani, who has been in Denver to offer an anti-Democratic presence to media gathered there for the Democratic convention. Guiliani made the suggestion that Hillary Clinton is helping Republican candidate [...]
Steve Yelvington blog-mused: “Are obituaries obsolete?” He argues that newspapers should have “living documents” cataloging and documenting people’s lives on an ongoing basis, rather than an obituary published just at the person’s death.
I want to take a slightly different angle. Many newspapers pre-write obituaries of notable people in their [...]
I’m going to partake of a little nostalgia here. Stop reading if you don’t care about the early days of interactive news. …
Back in 1994, I started an e-mail discussion list called Online-News. It turned out to be the primary hangout for lots of the pioneers in the field of [...]
The concept of “citizen journalism” has been around for a while now, and early applications of the concept typically have involved creating a platform for people to share what they know. A classic example of this is CNN’s iReport website, where all of us are encouraged to put [...]
There are a few things that local newspapers and other news outlets (TV, radio) don’t do well, and I’m always on the lookout for solutions. Here’s one that’s come up for me many times over the years:
Something happens locally, like, say, a fire; there’s a lot of smoke in the [...]
On BusinessWeek.com, Ben Kunz writes about the trouble Twitter is having coming up with a business model. He suggests a bunch of possibilities, but finds problems with all of them.
I don’t get it. It strikes me that the best model is incredibly simple, and powerful: Insert a “TwitterAd” [...]
I finally succumbed to iPhone fever and got an iPhone 3G the other day. While I’ve been thinking about the expanded mobile footprint in our lives for a while, having this thing in my hands really brings the future into focus.
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One big thing that the iPhone represents is the [...]
Thanks to a cool plug-in for Wordpress called WPtouch from BraveNewCode.com, this blog now has an iPhone version. That is, if you view steveouting.com on an iPhone, it will automatically pick up the mobile version.
If you’re curious what it looks like and don’t have an iPhone or iTouch, there [...]
I’m on record as not being impressed by the Orlando Sentinel print edition redesign. There’s the issue of where to put the reinvention resources, first; I believe the Sentinel should be focusing foremost on digital strategy, and not putting too much faith in a print redesign saving the company. [...]
