online newspapers

Frequency: Our toughest challenge

In my PublishAsia presentation in Macau I walked through a general business case for social networking as an integrated feature of a news website.

The argument goes like this: We have an audience problem. We can fix our sales incentives, train our people, tune our pricing and our packaging, and replace leadership as necessary. But at the end of the day we're going to hit a very hard wall. That wall is available advertising inventory that meets the advertisers' needs.

Newspapers online: Wikipedia's worst article?

While working on a presentation today I was looking for some dates and stumbled across Wikipedia's Online Newspapers entry, which may be the worst page in the entire collection. What little information it has is riddled with inaccuracy. This probably is an illustration of the Cobbler's Children principle. Perhaps some J-prof could armtwist an undergrad into fixing it.

Fortunately we have Dave Carlson's Online Timeline, which is thorough and accurate.