Morris has several interesting openings right now:
New media directors at several newspapers ranging from the Florida Times-Union to little Pittsburg, Kansas. The job is opening up any day now at Bluffton Today. A new media director has a tough job, like a publisher, integrating revenue, audience, journalism and public service issues, and serving as a key management team member.
In a comment, Tish Grier observes that Wall Street needs to get out and talk with real people. She's right, but so do newspapers. I just got back from several days in a local market where a team of Medill students did exactly that, interviewing hundreds of regular people -- women, youth, small business folks and so forth -- as part of a project building on the NewspaperNext Blueprint for Transformation. It's exciting stuff, and I look forward to being able to say more about it later.
If you agree that TV news has more in common with professional "wrestling" than journalism, you'll enjoy this from the folks at Jib Jab:
Tim O'Reilly, the Harvard-trained classical literature buff who made his name and fortune peddling geek books featuring funny animals, has turned his attention to the plight of newspapers in a post titled "SF Chronicle in Trouble?" He writes:
Howard Weaver wants six-word stories.
The problem with Tim Porter's blog is that he doesn't write often enough. That's probably because he's been busy finishing up his book, "News, Improved: How America's Newsrooms Are Learning to Change," written with Michele McLellan. I preordered my copy today (it's published April 1) and took note of his return to the keyboard with "The Real Heroes of Newspapers," in which he takes a shot at a couple of high-profile quitters.
Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its report, "The State of the News Media 2007," and I'd really like to read it before commenting on it. Unfortunately I didn't make it past the first page of the 38-page executive summary before stumbling over this sentence:
For some, the new brand is what Wall Street calls “hyper localism” (consider the end of foreign bureaus at the Boston Globe or the narrowing of the coverage area at the Atlanta Journal Constitution).
The last year has been a PR debacle for the newspaper industry, but some positive stories are trickling out. Last month Lisa Snedeker at Media Life wrote "Fact is, your average paper is just fine", pointing to the strengths of small-market newspapers.
It's been something like six months since the launch of the Times Reader, which I dissed as Microsoft's deja-vision of the future. Now Hearst, which owns the troubled Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has lined up with the dark side, announcing its own downloadable reader. Similar announcements have come from Forbes and London's Daily Mail.
One day I was doing some consulting and sat down with a new media director to talk about how he might work to make his website more complimentary and less directly competitive with his newspaper.
Develop the interactive community, I said.
But that takes time and people that I don't have, he said.
