media
Focus on print hurts newspaper sites
Submitted by Bryan on October 16, 2008 - 5:04pmMark Van Pattern has written a piece on PBS's MediaShift titled, "How the Focus on Print Hurts Our Newspaper Site". His story is a common story I hear time after time from those in the newspaper business.
It's definitely no tangled bureaucracy, but even within this simple system you find conflicts holding the website back. The problem is that the different people in that system just have different priorities. As general manager, I want to see both a strong online presence and continued healthy print circulation. In contrast, the managing editor doesn't want to "hurt" the print edition by making the online edition too strong, fearing that it could tempt subscribers to abandon print.
Ultimately, this conflict is what's holding our online edition back. Without a full commitment from the managing editor, the website will never reach its full potential.
The digital age remains to be a dillemna for newspapers. Newspapers either have to ballance their resources between print and online media or put more focus on one over the other. I think it becomes even more difficult for publications when they find a large readership online yet the higher revenue remains on the print side. Although it may take some years, I still say that eventually online media will beat old media. It is just a matter of time.
CNET Blog: Bloggers should be allowed to join the journalist party
Submitted by CMS Report on October 21, 2007 - 12:10am"Declan McCullagh over at News.com, has written up a fine piece that discusses the genesis of the new journalist bill approved by Congress earlier this week. And while McCullagh can walk you through the travels this bill has made for approval, I want to discuss why this bill is a load of crap."
Saying Goodbye to Old Media
Submitted by Bryan on September 10, 2007 - 4:17pm
Open source fans likely would have interest in knowing that the site runs Joomla! for it's content management system. Weather buffs who border on the geeky side also might find interest that much of the site's weather graphics are provide by HAMweather. HAMweather provides weather-related products and services (some of it for free) and in my opinion produces some of the best "custom" graphics derived from the National Weather Service's NDFD. While the site's software has caught my attention, for a change it is something else that has caught my attention. After visiting the site a few times and a chain of events, I suddenly realized that sites such as MySiouxFalls, NowPublic, and The Register are slowly changing my habits as a news reader.
Quoting IT: Newspapers not Breaking Out of the Box
Submitted by Bryan on October 11, 2006 - 5:01am"A huge part of the problem is that newspaper companies are still being run, mostly, by people from the print side -- and who, though they may attempt to understand interactive media and the needs and media habits of young people, aren't effective at moving their organizations in a radically different, and necessary, direction."
-Steve Outing, "Why Aren't Newspapers Breaking Out of the Box", Editor & Publisher, September 25, 2006
