My 11 yo daughter called me while I was driving home last night, to ask me to pick up a newspaper so she could start her weekly current events assignment for school. Without thinking, I told her “you don’t want a newspaper for that, you need to get the information of the web where it’s up to date.” Now I’ve worked with newspapers on and off since my days atthe University of Vermont, and I worked for Atex where we…
Welcome to our brave new world…it is a place in which style triumphs substance, and appearance supercedes truth. A place where the personal myths we create become truth, and are rechristened as “personal branding.” We are in the age of the micro-celebrity. The era in which we don’t need to be fully rounded individuals, where simply being the “thought leader”, guru or expert in a certain online niche is enough. Warhol was right, we indeed will all have our 15…
I read an interesting post this morning by Michael Hickins on The Faster Times that posit that “Internet Isn’t Killing Papers, We Are“. His basic premise: that the tech industry, and the web in particular with with the dotbomb era and sky high salaries and insane stock packages, inflated journalist salaries well beyond their regular levels. Why? Because salaries had to be adjusted for the stock options that artificially inflated the potential compensation packages offered by the dot-com start-ups. How…
Jim Louderback of Revision3.com has a great article up at JackMyers.com entitled “Murphy-Goode Wines Social Media Campaign Goes Horribly Wrong” about the companies recent trip to the Internet woodshed over their handling of I-celeb Martin Sargent during a recent online spokesperson ballot. While the specifics are generally quite funny…Jim gives us an excellent list of 5 takeaways that any of us who might consider a Social Media campaign ought to commit to heart: Respect the Wisdom of the Crowds: If…
I’m at the point that I can barely watch the news anymore. Almost a month in and they are still talking round the clock about the death of the mono-gloved King of Schlock…as though we should really care. What I do care about is that we stop looking at drug-addled sequin-encrusted performers as heros. They aren’t. Real heros are the folks that do the right thing when it’s too easy to do the wrong thing. They’re the people that take…
(Disclaimer: I work for Namemedia, Inc. who is one of the largest owners and resellers of domains in the world. I don’t work in that end of the business, and I don’t speak for them.) I picked up an interesting article today via David Churbuck’s Delicious.com feed, from USA Today with the salacious title “‘Cybersquatting’ crooks profit on marketers’ brand names.” Now I hate cybersquatting, but I have to say this, which I said yesterday and have said ad nauseum…
The “Special Sauce” for news media has always been investigative journalism, ala Woodward and Bernstein. It’s what made myself and an entire generation of young writers want to get into journalism back in the 1970’s, each of us aching to bring the mighty low, to shine lights into dark places and in the process, make our names, too, household words. Today, investigative journalism is a dying craft. Dying not because there aren’t reporters willing to ask the tough questions, but…
My father used to tell a story from his youth, growing up in the depression with my Grandmother and my Great Aunt Sue, the family matriarch and a woman whose strength I never fully appreciated in my youth. There were rules which Aunt Sue used to keep the family together, and one of those was “No Day Laborers.” It was tough times in Dorchester, Ma during the Great Depression. As it turned out, that rule worked quite well for the…
…And every blogger as well. From Journalism.co.uk via Brenda Christensen, a list of the skills every journalist should have. 5. That churnalism is much easier to spot online. If you do this regularly, your readers are already on to you – merely re-writing press releases without bringing anything to the table no longer cuts it. 6. Google is your friend. But if you are not using advanced search techniques, you really have no idea what it is capable of. 7. You do…
Via Editor and Publisher…with a pointer from Hart Van Denburg. Less than two years after it was bought by a private equity group, the Star Tribune has filed for reorganization under Chapter 11 bankruptcy. But wait, there’s more… In December, Harte told employees the “survival of the company” was at stake and asked labor unions to agree to $20 million in cuts by mid-January. Without those cuts, Harte said the newspaper could face bankruptcy. The Star Tribune ranked as the…