newspapers

I was on the road all last week, and I didn't live-blog a remarkable seminar in Los Angeles for two reasons. One: the usual annoyingly bad hotel wifi connection in the conference rooms. Two: I didn't want to invade the privacy of the participants. In the prep work, one of the editors quipped that he was reluctant to document his vision because these days his memo would immediately wind up on Romenesko. Sometimes we need to talk privately in order to work publicly.

I just wrote a note to an NAA mailing list on the topic of organizational structure that is a bit more radical than positions I've previously taken.

Like pretty much everybody who's spent a lot of time on the New Media side of the Great Divide, I've been leery of organizational integration. Why? Because Luddite values are deeply ingrained in traditional newspaper operational groups, and those values will lead us to defeat. Equally deeply ingrained: Utter denial that those Luddite characteristics exist. It's a dangerous combination.

Back in 1998 when I was at the Star Tribune, the Cowles family sold it to McClatchy for about $1.2 billion. McClatchy was a big surprise -- hardly anyone at the paper had heard of the company, and the sale price was a shocker.

I left the Star Tribune in 1999, and now McClatchy has sold the paper to a private investment group for $530 million, less than half that. I'd love to be able to point to myself as a factor (and maybe throw in a couple of others, such as Tim McGuire and Tom Mohr) but not even my kids will believe that line.

While working on a presentation today I was looking for some dates and stumbled across Wikipedia's Online Newspapers entry, which may be the worst page in the entire collection. What little information it has is riddled with inaccuracy. This probably is an illustration of the Cobbler's Children principle. Perhaps some J-prof could armtwist an undergrad into fixing it.

Fortunately we have Dave Carlson's Online Timeline, which is thorough and accurate.

Quite a few newspapers are now either using Drupal CMS or planning to use Drupal soon, so Nikolai Thyssen of Dagbladet Information in Copenhagen has created a space at groups.drupal.org. You can join at http://groups.drupal.org/newspapers-on-drupal.

Time magazine has a piece proclaiming the continued existence of newspapers, which is a nice observation (yes, they are still extraordinarily profitable relative to other types of business).

But in in a sidebar, Bob Mong, editor of the Dallas Morning News, is quoted:

The Pulitzer Prize rules have been changed again to open the door a bit wider to online content, although the contest continues to be limited to "newspapers published daily, Sunday, or at least once a week during the calendar year." The contest now will consider "a full array of online material -- such as databases, interactive graphics, and streaming video -- in nearly all of its journalism categories."