In Google Books, I found some history on the Kansas City Kansan, which delivered its final print edition today. Which is drawn from the minutes of a meeting of something called the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Commercial Organization Secretaries. The group appears to [...]
Found this history of the Rocky Mountain News via Google Books. The passage is from History of American Journalism, published in 1917.
ROCKY MOUNTAIN PAPERS OF COLORADO
In Denver The Rocky Mountain News has the distinction of being the oldest paper in Colorado. Its first issue was April 23, 1859, in [...]
It’s been quite a year for journalism. It’s been scary at times, aggrevating at times and there have been some glimmers of hope for future success. I don’t feel like the same person who started 2008 and who ends it now, and I bet you don’t either.
A year ago, I [...]
I think this obit of Tom Gish came to me via Romenesko earlier today. I just now had time to read it. It’s all worth reading, but here’s the relevant hyperlocal/citizen journalism part:
The Gishes were city journalists when they published their first edition in January of 1957, and they [...]
Horace Greeley to “Friend Fletcher” in April, 1830:
Begin with a clear conception that the subject of deepest interest to an average human being is himself; next to that he is most concerned about his neighbors. Asia and the Tongo Islands stand a long way after these in his regard…. Do [...]
The quote is from Walter Lippmann’s book Public Opinion. Keep in mind, he wrote this in 1922, not 2002.
This insistent and ancient belief that truth is not earned, but inspired, revealed, supplied gratis, comes out very plainly in our economic prejudices as readers of newspapers. We expect the newspaper [...]
If you’re in New England, I invite you to attend the New England New Media Associate fall conference.
NENMA gathering are always good events — neat people to meet and talk with.
I want you to come Oct. 30 if you’re in the area so you can hear my keynote presentation [...]
If you asked me, what’s the one thing you do well, I would say: Hire people.
Not every hire I’ve ever made has worked out (I can think of two that haven’t out of about 15 I’ve made), but I’ve learned from my mistakes. Today, I’m quite confident that I have [...]
I’ve just sent this e-mail to Berkeley Breathed in response his quote in this Salon piece.
Dear Mr. Breathed,
I was surprised to read in Salon:
‘In 1986 I had a cockroach scream, “Reagan sucks!” in print size that took up the entire cartoon box. Nobody blinked — 1,000 newspapers, quiet as [...]
A while back, I did a blog post about bright people who have left the industry. Here’s a quick update (and I welcome further input from anybody who has other names to add).
When, as a journalist, you possess information that will have some impact on society, will effect people’s lives, or otherwise rises to some level of salient import, do you have an obligation to publish or broadcast that information immediately, or is it OK to hold it to serve the business [...]
In the days prior today’s bailout vote, you could surf through Google news and find any number of stories that told us that the U.S. economy is in a crisis, and that spending $700 billion to bail out Wall Street bankers was unavoidable.
Or you could turn on the television and [...]
Some people think the web makes the world bigger. I say, it makes it smaller. Some people say the web makes us neighbors with people in Kenya or the Ukraine. I say it makes us better neighbors with the family next door.
There was a time in United States history when [...]
Soon after our launch, we owed Philip Anselmo a vacation (he transferred from another GateHouse paper), so I got to be The Batavian’s reporter for four of five days (Ryan Sholin filled in for a day, too).
During that week, there were two fire in Genesee County — one was a [...]
On May 1, we launched a project in Batavia, NY to work out how to build an online-only, local news business. We wanted to go to a town where we didn’t have a newspaper so that we could have the freedom to experiment without concerns about disrupting one of our [...]
From today’s Vin Crosbie’s post — a nugget related to why the BiggerBetter video strategy is a sputtering strategy:
The overabundance of suppliers of news and information, nonetheless the supply, leads to another corollary, one that might seem to be counter-intuitive: the ‘good enough’ beats perfect. The overabundance of [...]
Newspapers should have kickass web sites.
Take your typical major metro — a content producing staff that out paces in training, experience and numbers any rival.
A typical metro remains the best advertising buy in town, retail and classifieds.
The free cash a good metro site can through off on print up sells [...]
From Beet.tv:
Online videos have a short shelf life, getting a quarter of their views within four days of being published, Brett Wilson, CEO of video distribution site TubeMogul, says. Content creators who publish a lot of video will have a better shot at success.
He suggests that content creators [...]
Reporters who own their jobs with an entrepreneurial spirit and energy will also own each story they do. What does story ownership mean?
Nick Sergeant has completed his first Django project. It’s called Finisht.com. It’s really for developers who want a quick and easy way to track finished projects.
In an era when journalists are asked to do more and more, I can see reporters and editors using this for their own [...]
When I posted about journalists setting their own 2008 MBOs, A couple of executive editors like the idea of the program and instituted something like it in their own newsrooms. Today, John Robinson reports that his wallet is $100 lighter.
Among other things, designer Mel Umbarger created a copy [...]
Blogging has been light here for some time.
I’m tired of arguing with curmudgeons and the class hearty souls who discovered the web in 2004 and now has all the answers (many of them tried by online news veterans 10 years ago).
Just about everything I have to say, I’ve said. I [...]
Which of these stories would you rather read?
After Fleeing Psychiatric Unit, Ex-Officer Is Killed in a Gunfight With Police
Carrying two handguns and a Bible, a retired city police officer was killed in a gunfight early Tuesday on a residential street in Staten Island by former colleagues who returned his fire, [...]
I’ll be attending two journalism conventions over the next couple of months to talk about digital-age journalism.
On August 8, I’ll be on the luncheon panel at the AEJMC convention in Chicago. The topic is Networked Journalism: The Changing Face of News. Also on the panel, Kate Marymont, a Gannett [...]
Journalism.co.uk has an e-mail interview with me about starting MediaGeeks.org.
[...]Here’s a quote for any online manager dealing with a newsroom of curmudgeons. It’s from Theodore Roosevelt. Blow it up big and post it for all to see.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer [...]
The Ventura County Star’s Scott Hadly is reporting from Iraq. I haven’t been following his coverage, but I met none of it matches the intimacy and immediacy of this letter he wrote to a fellow reporter.
In one short letter, I got a better idea of what’s going on in [...]
In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, many newly minted bloggers expressed frustration at the mainstream media’s (soon to be dubbed MSM) lack of attention to serious international news.
Case in point was cable news obsession with Chandra Levy’s death. So, when on the E&P site today, I saw a [...]
There are three main points from the new report from the Readership Institute (via Romenesko):
It’s a nice virtuous thing that Meranda Watling is proud to work for a newspaper. But that’s not the reason I’m linking to her post. This is:
That story that broke at 4:30? It came in via an e-mail tip. I actually “broke” the news about 4:40 p.m. I had [...]
There continues to be lots of chatter about the closing of Online Journalism Review.
I used to work with Robert Niles at E.W. Scripps. He’s a fine person and did an admirable job with OJR given the resources he was given. So no slight intended here …
I’ve been an [...]
I’m seriously behind in my gmail inbox … can’t sleep tonight for some reason, so thought I would try to widdle the pile down a bit …
Found an e-mail from John Solomon, who wrote to say he was inspired by the wired journalist MBO post, which led him to [...]
I’ve set up my work phone to forward to my iPhone. I never touch my desk phone except for conference calls.
Unfortunately, if a call forwards to my iPhone, if I don’t get it by the third ring, for some odd reason, the call reverts to my desk phone. This leads [...]
John Wilpers is taking aim and taking names … he goes hunting for the top newspapers in the industry and asks if they’re really doing a good job at being the center of the local mediasphere.
And notice, I didn’t say “blogosphere,” because even though he concentrates on blogs in [...]
Via Martin Stabe, comes this provocative post on the deconstruction of the story.
But here’s the thing: journalists have always been far more entranced by ‘the story’ than audiences. Less than a quarter of newspaper readers claim to read to the end of a story, even [...]
Christopher Wink sends this e-mail:
What is the line with all of these online networking devices? I read with interest through my Google reader your post on increasing one’s searchability online , which was exactly why I started my Web site back in December. I have a Flickr account and [...]
Interesting post from Howard Weaver about what some newspaper companies are going through (and I think his primary intended audience is McClatchy).
He says this:
Time is not our friend. Mark Zieman in Kansas City introduced me to the poem Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day, which includes the [...]
Ok, so I’m going to show bad form and gloat a bit.
I read this post from Beet.tv this morning with some sense of vindication.
With hand held cameras, video reporting is a natural extension of print reporting and holds great advantage for newspaper publishers, says pioneering news producer Tammy Haddad.
In [...]
The blogosphere has been abuzz with chatter about the Orlando Sentinel redesign, so I’ll skip hunting up some relevant link for this post — you all know what I’m talking about.
The whole hullabaloo reminds me of a thought I’ve had many times recently: Why not just let a print newspaper [...]
So far, 18 people have registered to comment on howardowens.com. For a fairly low traffic blog, I think that’s pretty good.
What’s interesting is how many people have registered — the majority — without then leaving a comment. They just registered.
That’s a phenomena we’ve observed at GateHouse, too, where we [...]
There is much being made of the Orlando Sentinel redesign.
Yes, it’s shocking. It’s bold. It’s wild.
But original? Hardly.
Just take a look at the Bakersfield California’s front page from today.
Orland’s plans seem tame by comparison, and Bakersfield launched that format on March 1, 2006 (I know, I was there; [...]
My post critiquing the online activity of SPJ’s Mark of Excellence caused a stir. Predictably, not everybody liked it. But it also seemed to do some good. A few of the students mentioned came to the site with positive responses.
Claire St. Amant just left this comment on the post:
I [...]
I’ve told you before, Topix is not your friend. They’ve been taking your headlines and links, even your photos, and using them to build a community of people interested in those local topics, your franchise. And all the while, trying to build a local classified network of FREE classifieds.
Now [...]
Here’s a fairly dramatic bit of cellphone journalism — it’s of a three-car crash in Brookline, Mass.
Just sharing as yet of another example of how spot news can be reported by anybody these days. I recommend clicking through to YouTube and reading the eyewitness account.
Make Your Media Searches Easier: [...]
Would you run something like this in your traditional newspaper?
I’m a bisexual woman, age 20, and I am threesome-ing it with my best friend and her boyfriend during a stay abroad. I knew the girl (who’s mostly straight) beforehand. The girl thinks it’s hot when I participate — i.e., when [...]
I can think of some very good ideas for brining in people from outside the newspaper industry to help us save ourselves:
I just got through saying that registration doesn’t cut down on participation on a newspaper.com. I’m pretty sure the same doesn’t hold true for a blog.
There is something fundamentally different about a blog audience and a newspaper.com audience — whether it is that the newspaper.com audience is less web savvy, [...]
For newsrooms willing to take control of their participation and conversation on their own sites, here are some tips and suggestions I hope they find helpful:
There is a tendency among some (many? most?) editors and newsroom staffs to take a “set it and forget it” attitude toward online community.
“We’ve got comments on stories? Great. Now we can get back to real journalism.”
Here’s a headline for you: Online community is real journalism.
In 2008, the notion that [...]
There was this big deal about how Wikipedia beat Associated Press on Tim Russert’s death.
Well, I just thought I’d note — it’s been, what, two weeks since the world learned that Rob Curley left the Washington Post and his Wikipedia entry still hasn’t been updated.
Come on, I [...]
My friend Matt Welch, a former LAT opinion editor, has some not very nice things to say about the Times:
A small detail, but perhaps illustrative (or counter-illustrative) at a time when the Holocaust itself will soon be blamed on Sam Zell — my former newspaper, in fat times as [...]
Up until September 2006, I spent my entire journalism career on the West Coast, and mostly with very little travel.
I knew journalists and newspaper people throughout California, and because of online e-mail lists and such, I knew a handful of people based in other parts of the U.S.
Frankly, I was [...]
It looks like I’ve successfully restored my blog … and within the bounds of “well, this is WordPress,” some degree of confidence that the site is currently hack free. (Check this TechCrunch post for more on WP and security).
It turns out that the reason my initial restoration effort failed [...]
So this bit on Romenesko caught my eye today:
SPJ’s Neil Ralston says: “I encourage media executives who are looking for the next wave of high-quality journalists to pay attention to the winners. …These young men and women represent some of the best that journalism programs have to offer.”
Being a [...]
Remember NewzJunky? Previously, we noted (here and here) how the start-up, one-man site was beating the WatertownDailyTimes.com in traffic — an unusual phenomena in the world of local online news.
Well, both Compete and Quantcast show NJ still winning the audience war, but the gap [...]
The Newspaper Association of America released a report today on newspaper video.
It provides some interesting stats on how papers are approach video, a fairly comprehensive overview of different strategic approaches (including GateHouse’s), and some hints, tips and equipment options for getting into video.
Make Your Media Searches Easier: mediageeks.org
[...]Part of my job is to travel around the country and visit our newsrooms, where I make a presentation about our online strategy. The Rockford Register Star is an example of a newsroom that has totally embraced the web. They produced the video below to incorporate into the GateHouse training [...]
In an age when information flows like a million Mississippis, we need to have an ethics about information.
In an age when access to information is as open as a billion galaxies, each individual is responsible for handling information ethically.
In an age when we are all information creators, contributors and consumers, [...]
Jack Lail finally convinced me to give The Flip Ultra a try. He told me the Ultra didn’t have the sound qualty problems of the older version of The Flip. Below are two clips demonstrating the camera’s capabilities a bit.
I like it. It’s super easy to use. The [...]
I want to make sure all my friends in Southern California know about this … wish I could go. If you don’t know Buddy’s music, you can find several great free MP3s on his web site. RIP, my friend.
Make [...]
Here’s a “must add” for your RSS reader and blog roll … the wild bunch (you know, people like Bob Benz and Wes Jackson) over at Maroon Ventures has launched a group blog.
This is a gang of smart people, so we should have high expectations for wise and [...]
Congratulations to my friend, Scott Karp, whose fledging business took a big step forward this week.
Today we’re announcing that Publish2 has raised $2.75 million in Series A funding from Velocity Interactive Group — Jonathan Miller and Ross Levinsohn will be joining our board (along with [...]
I point to TechCrunch all the time — both in this blog and in my public presentations — as an example of a journalistic blog.
It is a blog that breaks news, real news, important news. It is also a blog that is full of opinion. It is also a blog [...]
[youtube UpWWrFA7Nfw nolink]
Jim Brady, executive editor of WashingtonPost.com spoke with Beet.TV. He also covers some of the Post’s other multimedia efforts.
More from Brady on Beet.TV here and here talking about video.
Make Your Media Searches Easier: mediageeks.org
[...]If somebody had challenged me to write a blog post teaching journalists about online by using an American Idol contestant, I don’t think I would have even tried.
Shawn Smith just wrote a great post. He’s spot-on with his advice.
And if you didn’t watch Idol this week, you missed what [...]
You won’t find too many television web sites that beat their local print rivals online.
In Salt Lake, one station, KSL.com, is trouncing the two competing dailies. According to Lost Remote, it’s all about the classifieds.
Ouch. That’s gotta hurt. The TV site has twice the traffic [...]
I’m by far no fan of Eric Alterman, but his seven-page piece on the state of newspaper journalism in the New Yorker is a must read. There isn’t a thought out of place or a misdrawn conclusion. There’s no need for me to comment on it. It stands on [...]
There’s nothing to this blog thing, right? It’s just a lot of blow hards spouting opinions.
Well, upstart HuffingtonPost.com has surpassed DrudgeReport.com (not a blog, but more of a big media headline aggregator, and so well established now as to be pretty MSM) in traffic, and according to compete.com, [...]
[youtube Ui2IgNYuSOs nolink]
Quote: “If we disappeared tomorrow they (the people who call big media journalism dinosaurs) might have to reinvent something that looks like us.”
Make Your Media Searches Easier: mediageeks.org
[...]As newspapers struggle through a recession at a time of media tumult, Stowe Boyd writes:
The Big Band era is coming to an end, and while some oldsters are going to keep on listening to Count Basie and Duke Ellington, most of us are moving on to rock and roll. [...]
A common complaint in the journalism world is that newspapers aren’t innovative enough. The complaint usually goes something like, “Why didn’t a newspaper invent Google or Yahoo! or MySpace?” And then there is some finger pointing at executives for not funding R&D or being bold enough in their visions.
This “why [...]
Hey, it’s 2008! Go to college and learn to become a print reporter!
Watch is amazing video promoting Conestoga College’s journalism program.
[youtube ELoBRgruNAQ nolink]
Well, they do offer broadcast … here’s a list of their media courses. It must still be 1988 in Canada.
Not one mention of the web. Amazing.
Folks, [...]
Do me a favor, please, and go read this story in Western Horseman about the Army’s plans to take 400,000 acres of land from ranchers in Southeast Colorado. The story is the best I’ve seen so far of the issue.
This is an issue very important to my entire family. [...]
OK, IFRA, you’ve been pretty kind to me over the years, but I’m going to contradict your claim that your new IFRA Search is the first vertical search engine for the news industry.
IFRA Search, the search engine for the news publishing industry, officially goes online. With www.ifrasearch.com, IFRA [...]
A government law requiring online posters to provide real identity strikes me as a tad unconstitutional, but it’s worth noting.
Kentucky Representative Tim Couch filed a bill this week to make anonymous posting online illegal.
The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and [...]
MediaGeeks.org is the media-specific search engine I created several weeks ago using Google Customer Search.
If you haven’t tried it yet, please do.
Personally, I’ve found it very useful for looking stuff I’ve read some place some time but forgotten where, or even if I can remember I read in in [...]
If true, here’s a good move by Yahoo! They’re going to add video to Flickr.
Nobody should expect, I don’t think, for Yahoo!’s Flickr video to overtake Google’s YouTube any time soon, but sometimes being #2 isn’t a bad place to be.
Flickr has a huge user base. Certainly, many of [...]
Long, thoughtful, thought-provoking piece from Zac Echola. It’s a must read for any journalist with any doubt that the game has changed radically and forever. This isn’t a “transition period” for newspapers. It’s a whole new game.
See, I’m kind of tired of people talking about how newspapers are going [...]
I always figured some day I would get a chance to make history. It looks like it’s happening tonight. For the first time ever, the NPPA Northern Short Course is going to webcast a session live.
It starts at 6 p.m. EDT. It’s me and Chuck Fadely talking about video [...]
There’s an old saying in computers — I first heard when I was in the Air Force 26 years ago — “crap in, crap out.”
In other words, if you feed a computer gibberish, that’s all you’re going to get back.
Until artificial intelligence really becomes something, CICO will be true.
The same [...]
I’m preparing a post on newspaper blogging … it was partly inspired by something Mark Cuban wrote recently, but addressing Cuban’s rant has really more of a sidebar to my main point (I hope to finish that shortly), so I’m spinning it out here:
Newspaper blogging is probably the worst [...]
I didn’t bite when Andy Dickinson posted his rather cheeky “video strategy” videos. They’re well produced (Andy has a great narration voice) and funny in their way, but also (especially on the point-and-shoot side) spoiled by a few red herrings.
I just found that Cyndy Green (who we hired [...]
While I do agree that photographers are uniquely qualified to enter the video world, I know for a fact that reporters can do it too. I did it myself! Reporters must learn how to tell visual [...]
Any time you come across an article that favorably quotes Andrew Keen, start running … fast … naked, if necessary, down the street.
Keen has made name for himself as an expert on amateur content and its danger to society. The funny thing is, Keen is himself nothing but an [...]
Michael Arrington started TechCrunch in June, 2005. It’s now the second most popular blog in the world. According to Compete.com, it is read by at least 900,ooo people per month, but that wouldn’t include the reported 500,000 RSS feed subscribers.
As TechCrunch has risen, Business 2.0 has [...]
Here’s another shot over the bow of all those web videographer bloggers who make a religion of quality.
Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail, on the role of quality in media:
It turns out there are two dimensions of what we think of as [...]
Ask not what your newspaper company can do for you. Ask what you can do for your local media employer.
[...]One thing good developers do is play around with the new toys.
The other day, Nick Sergeant was messing around with Yahoo! Pipes. He discovered that by ingesting content from one of our newspaper sites, and comparing those stories to the content in a specific story, he could automatically [...]
Here is a chance to do something completely different.
GateHouse Media is looking for two ambitious, entrepreneurial individuals to help us reinvent local journalism.
The ideal candidate:
I’ve written before about the value of newspaper web sites trying to create community around profile/registration systems, and possibly even working toward requiring real identity.
Here’s another reason: Allowing unfettered anonymity could spur Congress to take away the protections of Section 230 for internet postings.
I thought of this while reading [...]
There’s been a great conversation on Poynter’s Online-News list about the value and relevance of local news.
What follows is what I posted to the list
Local news is a niche. It’s a vertical.This is good news for local newspapers, because one of the things the web does best is help [...]
I’ve written quite a bit recently about the need to reinvent journalism. Not everybody believes its necessary. I still say, we should listen to our readers more and less to other journalists and our sources.
Here’s more fuel to the fire:
Two thirds of Americans - 67% - believe traditional journalism [...]
If you missed the live stream yesterday, and you care, the archive of my interview with Mel Taylor on BlogTalkRadio yesterday can befound here.
More interviews from the NAA conference can be found here.
UPDATE: My coworker Shannon Dunnigan also interviewed. I also just finished listening to my [...]
