Yesterday morning I sat at the counter at Puffins Restraurant in Millbury having a wonderful plate of Eggs Latin, and as I struggled to read The Worcester Telegram while eating, I realized the problem with newspapers in print: the User Interface is pathetic. Here are just a few of the UI problems: The newsprint is too thin – trying to fold the paper into something you can handle with one hand is virtually impossible. Ink stained fingers – it used…
Yes, sometimes it’s in our best interest to do something we don’t really want to do, to literally kiss the pig. Nothing could better typify this than the great ad debate, that age old fight that occurs in media wherein the editorial staff seeks to maintain their supposed journalistic credibility by running a publication that is utterly advertising free, while the ad staff is running around trying to turn your hallowed publication into The Want Advertiser. When I worked…
Editor and Publisher is reporting that the Orange County Register is laying off 110 by Friday. We should remember that their parent company a few months ago launched a pilot program to outsource some editing to India, in addition to also sending some pages for pagination overseas as well. A flat world indeed! OCR Publisher Terry Horne: “This isn’t necessarily just to improve profitability, we have to become a different kind of company,” Horne said. “We will be more focused…
Monitor shifts from print to Web-based strategy. Wow – read the post before this first. Then read this. Here’s where we’re going, folks. This is earth shattering. The Christian Science Monitor plans major changes in April 2009 that are expected to make it the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day. The changes at the Monitor will include enhancing the content on CSMonitor.com, starting…
New York Times To Staff: Relax, We’re Not Firing You Yet Wow – even with out the Silicon Valley Insider’s snark, this is a wild and wooly bit to go out to the troops from the NYT Editor, Bill Keller. The cattle must have been close to stampede… Check out the Insiders conclusion: But we have a problem with Bill’s characterization of the cuts around the industry as “short-sighted.” Bill’s business reporters would never characterize them that way, and if…
I missed this one last week and it’s the kind of post that I think most Social Media wonks will gloss over – “Social Media Scalability, the New ROI Question” from Shel Israel at Global Neighborhood. Scalability is an issue for anyone who introduces something new online and wants to grow. It was true for the pioneers who predate social media like ICQ [LINK], for the Stanford start up team for a search engine called Google. It was true for…
For the past couple months I’ve been devoting a lot of my time to the re-release of http://www.geek.com – the online technology resource and community for technology enthusiasts and professionals. We’ve added a lot of social networking tools, and also done a general wordpress/bbpress upgrade which will allow us to easily take the latest releases in the future. This is important on a couple of levels, first off, this is a site that has over 10 million unique users a month. That…
(For our newer readers, I used to work for the premier supplier of newspaper software systems, and in the dim and distant past was a writer with the Worcester Telegram – so I still follow what’s going on in the print world quite closely) The Sunday New York Times had a very intesting article this morning entitled “I Got the News Instantaneously, Oh Boy” which was written by Media Writer Tim Arango. In it, Tim takes on the issue of…
Another really bad week in which to be a lover of print media. Yesterday came the stunning announcement that The New York Times Company ad revenues for all papers had declined 18% in July when compared with last years numbers. Even worse, especially if you’re a member for the Boston Globe or Worcester Telegram staff, the ad numbers for the Time’s New England Media Group dropped 24% vs. last year. Keep that in mind for a couple minutes…we’ll come back…
We’ve all done it. Try to email something to a friend and Outlook, or whatever mail client we use accidentally selects a different contact to send to. It’s not such a big problem when you’re sending pictures of the baby, or directions to the weekend barbeque, but what happens when you accidentally send sensitive information to the wrong person, like a journalist. The problem is utterly compounded when you give accidentally give access to your information sitting out in the…