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Last month a large and boisterous fire appeared on the rooftop gardens of a Toronto waterfront condo during the afternoon rush hour. Bright orange flame pierced thick black smoke, and the wind-whipped plume was so large and so high it was visible from clear across Lake Ontario, in St. Catherine’s, 51 kms to the south. Thousands of workers in the downtown towers gawked at the fire from their windows, commuter traffic slowed to a crawl along the elevated expressway mere metres from the fire-struck condo. On the islands and ferries and boats in the harbour, all
Continue reading Breaking News: The Top 5 mistakes newspaper make when news happens
Why are we always aiming at yesterday’s readers? I’ve spent the better part of the past year and a half building and installing a sprawling content management system at one of our larger newspaper chains. Eighteen months. And the entire time I’ve been beset by the nagging, gnawing worry that I’m just bolting a big shiny brand new anchor to the belt of a powerful — but aging — swimmer who even now is floundering in rough waters. These enterprise systems, even the newest releases, are inevitably constructed with layer upon layer of legacy code, programming bloated by years
Continue reading Newspapers: Stop chasing yesterday’s readers
As this day slowly slips away, I wonder if I should write this post at all. It’s March 1st. 2010. This morning, German authorities released Holocaust denier and Nazi apologist Ernst Zundel from jail. I know Zundel all too well. Back in the last century, I spent five or six years as an investigative reporter for the Toronto Sun, specializing in the rise and fall of Zundel, his sorry skinhead shocktroops, and the motley crew that coagulated under the Heritage Front banner waved by Zundel’s protegé, the late Wolfgang Droege. Nearly a decade later, in a post 9-11 America,
Continue reading Ernst Zundel goes free: Defending the indefensible
(Cross posted from ShiftLock, my tech column in the Canadian Newspaper Association’s paper, The Publisher)
Straws in the wind, or a sea change blowing in?
This past quarter at the New York Times (and my own newspaper and many, many others) circulation surpassed advertising as the dominant revenue source for newspaper operations. Advertising revenue for US newspapers showed double digit declines for the 8th consecutive quarter. A brand-new Portuguese national daily newspaper is attracting attention – and readers – with a design philosophy that places readers and their daily needs first. Paid circulation jumped by 50 percent within
Continue reading Goodbye advertising, hello circulation!
This week I teamed up with an old colleague, Steve Buist of the Hamilton Spectator, to spend a half day or so with editorial staff from the Metroland West community newspapers at their annual Editorial Training Day. Steve spent an hour and a half offering a highly personalized tour of the web tools he relies on for his – need I say it? – award-winning investigative reporting, with a focus on online court and government documents and databases. Steve has garnered multiple National Newspaper Awards and nominations for his work on topics like the food we eat (A Pig’s
Continue reading Going where your audience is (and newspapers mostly aren’t)
I originally developed this web writing checklist for my Writing for the Web class in WebU, but am reposting it here today because I’m giving a short seminar on this topic here at the Star. Additionally, one of the best resources for Writing for the Web has to be Jacob Nilson’s collection of posts on the topic at Useit.com Here are seven ways to get the most out of the web when publishing a story. Stop before posting ANY story and ask how you can enrich it for the reader: 1) Are there original documents you can link to?
Continue reading Seven Ways to Write Like a Digital Native
It’s Wordstock time again. It’s probably Canada’s longest-running annual professional development day for journalists and I got a chance to host two workshops – a panel on place blogging with David Topping of Toronto.ist and Tim Shore of Blog.To and the perennial Top Tools workshop. I felt pretty ambivalent about the Top Tools piece – I mean, who doesn’t already have a toolbox crammed to overflowing with useful, cool and free tools? I felt that way last year too when I did it, but my audience surprised me by being large and enthusiastic. And it quickly became obvious that
Continue reading The Top 1,002 Internet Tools for Journalists
Newspapers have to stop treating the web as a dumping ground for their printed product.
Huffington Post – the fast growing US news and politics aggregator and blog machine – has launched a beta version of their new local news model.Here’s how cheif Huffer, Arianna Huffington, described the new site:
HuffPost Chicago is part local news source, part resource guide, and part virtual soap box — featuring a collection of bloggers who know and love Chicago, and are looking to share their takes on everything from the Cubs to City Hall to the hot new local band to the best place for Greek food (and I can testify that there is a lot
Continue reading America’s most popular news blog goes local, takes on Chicago
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