A couple of things happened earlier this week that illustrate why the newspaper business is facing some real pain that just isn't going to go away. Poynter.org launched a career center and Editor&Publisher relaunched its classified job listings (the non-job classifieds, for printing equipment and such, aren't on the Web).
About a month ago, we quietly added a personalized page feature to BlufftonToday.com.
Personalization has been around for quite awhile -- it dates back to March 1995, when Jeff Boulter announced CRAYON (named for "CReAte Your Own Newspaper"). Newspapers haven't done much with it, but just about every portal and search engine has a my.sitename.com feature.
We've wondering whether a "my page" tool could contribute anything significant to frequency-of-use numbers, and there's no way to know without trying it, so we did.
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.
