Writing for the Readership Institute's blog, Rich Gordon has a thorough overview of the how and the why of online community for news websites. It should be a great resource as more print editors inherit online responsibilities in restructured newspapers.
Tom Evslin has a wonderful story of how many hands make light work. If you've ever wondered how companies with no apparent business model make money, it turns out that a bit of genuine citizen journalism may provide the answer.
Paul Graham documents 18 mistakes that kill startups. I particularly like this one:
5. Obstinacy
In some fields the way to succeed is to have a vision of what you want to achieve, and to hold true to it no matter what setbacks you encounter. Starting startups is not one of them. The stick-to-your-vision approach works for something like winning an Olympic gold medal, where the problem is well-defined. Startups are more like science, where you need to follow the trail wherever it leads.
At the Online Journalism Association conference in Washington earlier this month, I heard several people say too many newspapers are grasping at video and because it looks like the easy path to multimedia. Now comes Paul Bradshaw in the UK, blogging the same point of view.
Writing for the Club of Amsterdam, a futurist society, Milverton Wallace describes the rise of the amateur, "someone or an activity motivated by love" and not by the profit motive.
Lost in the knee-jerk anti-MSM reaction to the recent Belgian copyright case was a distribution-rights development that could be more important in the long run: ACAP, the Automated Content Access Protocol. It's an initiative to define a machine-readable "industry standard to enable the providers of all types of content published on the World Wide Web to communicate information relating to permissions for access and use of that content."
Mike Ward sends word from the University of Lancaster that a "Journalism Leaders Forum" Tuesday will be webcast live, and that one of the key participants, Tim Porter, will appear via weblink "from the States."
Dan Gillmor did a bit of telepresence for the University of Lancaster earlier this year from Hong Kong, as I recall. A few months ago, when I called on Dan to talk with the newsroom of the Savannah Morning News, we pulled it off with a couple of webcams, saving several thousand dollars and a lot of travel time.
Once in awhile something comes along that reduces me to quoting Peter Griffin: "Holy crap!" That's how good Paul Henry's "The War of the Words" is.
The nation's second largest newspaper is in one hell of a mess, and as Jeff Jarvis says, it's become something of a parlor game to answer the question, "What would you do with ...?"
Los Angeles Times Editor John Carroll quit last year in protest of budget cuts. Publisher Jeffrey Johnson defied corporate instructions to cut expenses this year, and was shown the door as his reward.
Bluffton Today has two design-production openings for people who get the whole "community in conversation with itself" thing. One is an online-focused job, one print-focused, but there's no big separation between the media at BT.
The online job requires the expected competencies: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Flash, audio/video, design, Photoshop, photography -- and a high level of comfort with people and online/offline interaction. Contact lisa.smith (at) blufftontoday.com for details.
