Newspapers face three different, but interrelated, economic challenges.
One is the technology-driven restructuring of the news business, in which the Internet is a major force that is disintegrating the traditional product model. That's a very real long-term process. It's not the biggest immediate source of trouble, but it's a factor.
Jeff Jarvis has started a good conversation with a post titled "Bad news, good news" at Buzzmachine. In response to a comment that "The problem with the Good News is that newspapers can’t translate an equal online readership into the same revenue as in print," I posted the note below, which cites the frequency-of-usage failure that I've mentioned on many previous occasions. Once again, I'm concerned that journalists just don't understand their role in creating or solving the underlying problem.
Every nine months or so, some mossback proclaims -- in print -- that newspapers would be just fine if they'd stop giving away their content on the Internet.
The latest is Stanford University journalism professor Joel Brinkley, who dishes out a mixture of bad reporting and wishful thinking in a Sunday op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, one of America's great failing newspapers.
Examples:
A lot of journalists have suddenly discovered Twitter, which figured prominently in some coverage of the Mumbai terror attacks. And many are baffled. Here's my simple explanation of Twitter:
It's like a big caffeine party. Everybody's talking at once. Really fast.
But you have magic ears.
You only hear the people you want to listen to, and the people who are saying something directly to you. This gives you a great deal of control over the quality of what you hear. If someone is irritating and trivial, just quit listening to them.
When I mentioned the other day that our site management system has more than 30 content types, you might have reacted in one of two ways:
1. Why on earth so many content types?
2. What's a content type?
Let's take the second question first, for clarity's sake.
In a comment yesterday, Ed Kohler raised some questions about timely vs. "stale news" that I thought I'd address by turning back to my theme of basic assumptions and assertions behind our site management system. Timeliness is right at the top of the list.
I've previously mentioned some of the assumptions and assertions behind the site management toolkit we're developing at Morris. One key assumption is that editors should be able to determine page layouts -- something that's just not possible with a lot of template-driven content management systems. Here's how we're making that work.
Editors begin by seeing the site pretty much as everyone else would.
In the wake of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, Mindy McAdams has put together a short history and timeline of breaking news on the Internet.
Today is the day when most Americans indulge in a ritual of family dining and pretend, for a couple of hours at least, that the fast-food junk-food snack-food culture doesn't exist and that we still know how to dine together.
Many of us pause for a moment to reflect on what we have for which we should be thankful.
I am thankful for many things.
I'm thankful for continued employment amid economic collapse -- something that many of my colleagues in the newspaper business don't have this Thanksgiving morning.
Can we stop acting like selling advertising into a network is some big radical shift? It's not. It naturally falls out of the NewspaperNext project, which is a couple of years old now.
