What have you learned about newsroom convergence?

Submitted by yelvington on March 11, 2009 - 2:02pm

For an internal report, I'm interviewing various people at work in an attempt to identify what we've learned from our efforts to combine print and online staffs into unified content teams.

But I'm also interested in hearing tales from outside the company, so here are a few questions. You can reply anonymously if you want, or just send me a private email at steve(at)yelvington(dot)com.

* What are the 3 biggest mistakes made in your newsroom in the convergence process? How would you avoid them, if you could do it all over again?

Why didn't newspapers try charging for online content? Well, they did ....

Submitted by yelvington on March 9, 2009 - 10:24am

I've heard it thousands of times: "The big mistake newspapers made was not charging for access from the beginning."

But it's not true that newspapers didn't charge for access right from the beginning.

Let's roll back the clock about 15 years. Here are some of the newspapers that were pursuing the paid-access model:

Eight barriers to local paid content

Submitted by yelvington on March 8, 2009 - 11:59am

This is likely to be ignored by advocates of charging for access to local news websites, but I'm going to pass out some free advice anyway.

Before embarrassing yourself and imperiling your company's future, consider the following barriers to your great new idea.

They are not all insurmountable, but if you plow forward in ignorance, a lot of people are going to get hurt.

Averages are dead

Submitted by yelvington on March 4, 2009 - 8:40am

I'm serious: Can we please stop talking about averages, medians and means? Can we please top thinking like we're living in 1955? There are no average people and no average products, blogs or newspapers. Everything is a special case. Get used to that.

Is the Fidler pad finally becoming real?

Submitted by yelvington on March 1, 2009 - 9:28pm

Before some of today's dotcom millionaires were born, Roger Fidler was walking around with a wooden mockup of a flat pad that would replace print with an electronic display. Being a newspaper guy -- he worked for the Knight-Ridder chain -- he envisioned it as a way to read newspapers, without paper or ink. It look pretty much like this:

What makes sense in mobile?

Submitted by yelvington on February 28, 2009 - 8:27pm

Like most news companies, after a bit of fiddling around with in-house development, we've outsourced most of our mobile services to vendors. Although none has a particularly impressive product, there's no point in throwing a lot of resources at it, particularly in the depths of a brutal business recession. There's no money for news companies in mobile services right now.

Another day, another Van Winkle

Submitted by yelvington on February 28, 2009 - 5:05pm

Today is February 28, and by bending time and space and peering through the Intertubes, I have just read a March 1 piece by Los Angeles Times columnist David Lazarus.

He is not back from the dead, just from the deathlike sleep that gripped so many print journalists over the last 15 years. Like so many other newsroom Rip Van Winkles, he has awakened to the importance of this Internet thing but failed to understand it: "iTunes proves newspapers can and should charge for online access."