The interactive skill set
Submitted by yelvington on November 20, 2006 - 5:43pmIf interactivity is one of the four keys to a successful news website, don't we need community management skills?
Let's bury the digital divide myth
Submitted by yelvington on November 20, 2006 - 4:52pmIn most newsrooms, if you chat long enough, someone will bring up the moldy old question: What about the digital divide?
Let's bury that.
Some 60 million U.S. households have Internet access. Daily newspapers reach only about 50 million households. Should we be talking about the print partition? The crushed-tree chasm?
Jakob Nielsen tackles the subject in his column this week, noting that falling prices for computer technology have demolished the "economic divide" argument.
Disconnecting MOM
Submitted by yelvington on November 16, 2006 - 4:35pmBack in the last century I participated in a New Directions for News workshop. We had one of those future-scenario breakout sessions, and my group sat down to design a new media product for 2010. Chris Mahai was our group leader, and she took us down an interesting, "jobs to be done" path (long before Innosight started throwing the phrase around). What would our lives be like in 2010?
Boiling down NewspaperNext
Submitted by yelvington on November 16, 2006 - 3:10pmAlan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design has boiled down 96 pages of Harvard Business School prose into bullet points. His bottom line for the N2 Blueprint for Transformation? "This thing is great. ... Go read it for yourself. All 96 pages."
Being interactive
Submitted by yelvington on November 15, 2006 - 8:36amContinuing my riff on the four keys to a great news website:
I stumbled across a great quote from the late Douglas Adams, who noted that we think everything invented before we were born is normal, everything invented before we were 30 is exciting, and everything invented after that is an offense against the natural order of things.
It's not just another edition or another channel, please
Submitted by yelvington on November 14, 2006 - 8:23amKevin Anderson hits the nail squarely:
A market-driven slant to journalism
Submitted by yelvington on November 13, 2006 - 2:52pmBen Compaine cites a National Science Foundation-funded study showing that it's the marketplace, not the ownership, that drives "slant" in news media. This makes perfect sense in a Darwinian way. Iconoclasts and polemicists may have their audiences, but you can't drift too far from the consensus and still maintain a big audience. So writers write and editors edit to the expectations of the community.
The New Media Establishment
Submitted by yelvington on November 13, 2006 - 1:59pmUK's Press Gazette (trade journal for newspapers) has churned up a list of "The New Media Establishment - 50 people shaping online journalism."
In the comments, this anonymous flame:
Again, is the editorial page obsolete?
Submitted by yelvington on November 12, 2006 - 9:36pmMore fuel on the fire: Writing for the Nation, Eric Alterman asks if it's "time to abolish the editorial page."
Exit Dean Baquet
Submitted by yelvington on November 8, 2006 - 8:42amI'm sorry to see Dean Baquet lose his job as editor of the Los Angeles Times. I take no joy in the wholesale restructuring of the newspaper business that I see unfolding before us. But it's real, it's necessary and it's driven by economic and technological change beyond our control.