Awhile back a team of Rich Gordon's whiz kids from Northwestern University worked with Davenport's Quad-City Times on a combo print-online youth product called Your Mom.
Last year the paper pulled the plug on the printed product but kept the website. Now Will Sullivan notes that the Lee Enterprises newspaper has killed Your Mom online as well.
Declan McCullagh of cnet reports that a group of Republicans want to ban school and library access to social networking sites by minors.
This spring's graduating class will be part of America's first generation to be forever connected. The story of America is largely one of individual and family migration, and the end of the school experience often was the end of relationships for many as they moved away for jobs and new lives.
News organizations are a lot like sheep. They graze together. Where they graze, the pretty much eat everything, right down to rock. When one gets spooked, they all get spooked. A sheep stampede is a thing to behold.
Writing for Poynter, Kelly McBride notes an outbreak of highly negative coverage of MySpace.com: "In the last month most MySpace stories come in three categories: Advice for hapless parents, criminal behavior and danger."
Pretty much every conventional U.S. daily newspaper published east of the Rocky Mountains has egg on its face this morning. So do some in the west. Contrary to what you may have found rolled up in your driveway this morning, 12 miners were not found alive in Tallmansville, W. Va. Between the time the presses rolled and the time the papers were delivered, the story took a tragic turn.
This isn't a new problem; I wrestled with it for years as a daily newspaper wire editor. But the world has moved on, and newspapers have not.
Chicago's Sun-Times is killing the free newspaper Red Streak, which it launched hurriedly in an attempt to counter the Tribune's Redeye. In Iowa, Lee Enterprises is shutting down Your Mom, a very cool project that was built in conjunction with Northwestern University (but it's keeping the website). Lost Remote takes notice of this and concludes "young people do not want print."
