I was looking over the Miami Herald's snazzy new Drupal-powered Miami.com website and was struck (hard NOT to be struck) by the brand-repositioning links at the top of the homepage:
Old brands are hard to reshape. Sometimes you do need to use a cannon to kill a mosquito.
Robert Putnam's theories about the formation of social capital are foundational to much of what I've been focusing on for the last several years, especially the 2005 launch of BlufftonToday.com. Blogging for the Readership Institute at Northwestern University, Rich Gordon describes troubling new findings in Putnam's latest research, and declares:
Neil Thurman of City University, London, has published a review of the ways British news media are using the tools of interactivity -- "user generated content initiatives," as he calls it. In many cases it's been a struggle and the outcomes have not met everyone's hopes.
Reading through it, I was struck by a recurring theme in his interviews with UK journalism executives. It goes like this: How can I add some of this user-generated filler to my soup without losing control of the flavor?
Scripps is shuttering the afternoon Albuquerque Tribune, and unlike its previous closure of the Cincinnati Post there seems to be no plan to continue with a Web operation. Up in Wisconsin, the afternoon Capital Times is killing its daily edition and will continue to publish on the Web, as well as producing a couple of free entertainment products each week.
Newsosaur Alan Mutter asks some worthwhile questions about newspapers losing the battle for audience retention despite doing some things right. He says the decline in stickiness is "puzzling in light of the energy most publishers in the last year have put into building traffic with such features as 24-hour news, video, blogs, podcasts, slide shows, interactive commentary and user-generated, hyper-local content."
For me, the Super Tuesday round of primaries has one clear, across-the-board winner: The New York Times. Why? Because nytimes.com took advantage of one great advantages of the online medium over broadcasting, offering a wealth of highly local detail through a very nice drill-down interactive graphical interface.
The #1 national newspaper managed to be very local, offering me data on how the vote in Columbia County, Ga., where I live, compared with the vote in other counties in Georgia.
The Chicago Tribune has shut down commenting on a range of political stories, and public editor Timothy McNulty tries to explain why. But the Tribune got it wrong from the start by allowing auto-published comments without even the basic step of authenticating the user's email address. This irresponsibility led to the an outcome that was utterly predictable.
McNulty's defense of the shutdown, however, doesn't stand up. For example:
