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.
Om Malik profiles a company he calls "the American Idol of digital photography." The idea: Get photographers to compete online to get their work printed in a magazine. The site: JPG magazine.
It's human nature to compete for scarce resources. Online space isn't scarce, but print always is scarce. I wonder what use newspapers could make of this principle. Hmm.
(Here's something I posted to a mailing list. It's a tangent from discussion of low newspaper website traffic on Sundays.)
Newspaper readership has been declining steadily since 1970. Confronted with the Internet, newspapers generally have responded by creating "online newspapers," transporting a failing product model from dead trees to electrons.
We've rolled out a new design for BlufftonToday.com, visually aligning the website more effectively with the printed newspaper and fixing some usability issues that were identified in the site's first year of operation and through formal testing.
The changes include a number of new functions and features, particularly in the social networking area. User profile pages now include buddylist avatars and guestbooks.
I've been on the road a bit lately doing actual work on some projects. Upcoming I have several conferences:
New York Press Association convention. For some reason it's in Vermont. I've never been to Vermont but I hear they make good ice cream. Flying to Albany Thursday, speaking Friday, and theoretically home Friday night. We'll see.
We're always looking for easy answers to complex questions. Tom Mohr's piece in E&P strikes me as a case of that.
There is no magic bullet, and binding together the newspaper industry's generally misdirected online efforts into a single effort is unlikely to provide one. Bigger is not better.
There's no question in my mind that the newspaper industry ought to be working together constructively.
In my job as a strategist I often use a fairly simple trick to get the process going: Turn the problem over. What if all your assumptions are wrong? Flip-flop them and see what you learn.
Recently I was on panel at the annual Society of Professional Journalists convention Chicago. Here are three examples I gave of "bad" that have "good" aspects if you change your point of view.
Presstime, the monthly magazine of the Newspaper Association of America, asked me to write an opinion piece for Back«Talk, a column inside the back cover. It's on page 60 of the September issue. Here is the text.
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I once worked for a major newspaper that didn't have a news obituary page. So the newspaper formed a committee to draw up standards. It met for six months before a dead person could get into the newspaper.
We can't work that way any more. The world is being remade by people don't form committees that meet for six months to avoid making mistakes.
Kudos to the Online Journalism Review and Robin Miller for observing "the poor quality of online forums run by newspapers and other local media outlets" and offering "Five rules for building a successful online community."
Rob's been doing this for along time, and has some great points to make. I've been running online communities for a long time as well (since 1986). Not surprisingly, I disagree with a few of his assertions and agree with others. Here are my reactions.
For those of us struggling to understand the consequences of opening up our local news websites to broad public participation, Ulises Ali Mejias has a helpful essay, Social Media and the Networked Public Sphere. He focuses on a key distinction between mass and public:
