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By Bill, on June 30th, 2008
As I was preparing the "Seven Steps To Writing Like a Digital Native" guide, I was struck again by just how much newspapers are blinded to the power the web offers us. It is, I think, one of the biggest mistake newspapers make online: failing to use the web’s rich resources or at least some of them, in every story. It’s a mistake is deeply rooted in our print culture — we’re highly competitive and we’re used to owning and controlling everything we publish. But the web is different and that mistake costs us dearly, I think because it
Continue reading Why Newspapers Still Don’t Get The Web
By Bill, on June 25th, 2008
By Bill, on June 24th, 2008
Here are the seven tips I give our WebU students who are learning how to write for the web.Stop before posting ANY story and ask yourself these seven questions about how you can enrich your story for the reader:1) Are there original documents you can link to?If you’ve downloaded a report, meeting minutes or agendas, watched a video or listened to a tape — share it. If it’s living elsewhere on the web, link to it. If you have your own copy – can you scan it? Post it yourself? Tell people how they can get their own physical
Continue reading Seven Steps to Writing Like a Digital Native
By Bill, on June 10th, 2008
Business Week’s Media Columnist Jon Fine did us all a favour by reproducing in it’s entirety a speech given by newspaper chain CEO Dean Singleton at the World Association of Newsapers’ annual conference, held this year in Sweden. Singleton (whose chain, News Media Group, owns Denver Post, San Jose Mercury etc.) opened his speech with a well-placed kick to the midsection of a prone Lord Black of Crossharbour:
Thank you for once again inviting me to address the World Association of Newspapers. I spoke to you at the 2003 meeting in Dublin. My speech was followed by a presentation
Continue reading Forty percent of the Top 50 US newspapers are bleeding red ink, says top CEO
By Bill, on June 6th, 2008
So Rob Curley has finally flopped moved on.(See update at end of post)One of online journalism’s undoubted stars — the driving force behind a crew that created the award-winning, high on cool and low to the ground sites like LJWorld.com and KUSports.com and the Naples Daily News site — has left LoudounExtra.com, which appears to be floundering. LoudounExtra was a model hyper-local news website template he was building for the Washington Post, but after about a year he and much of his team have decamped for … Las Vegas.Don’t get me wrong — I think Rob’s a brilliant
Continue reading Rob Curley’s crew flees suburbia for … Las Vegas
By Bill, on June 2nd, 2008
Just got back from Mags University, a magazine and internet publishing conference in Toronto where I offered a roomful of magazine journalists a "Digital Survivor’s Guide".I had to throw my presentation together in something of a hurry as I was a last minute replacementfor Mark Briggs, a Tacoma, Washington sport journalist turned web evangelist who’d been scheduled to give the talk — from Tacoma via streaming video or something — but in the end couldn’t make it.I borrowed some from the talk Star web editor Marissa Nelson and I gave at Wordstock 2007, adding in some of the stuff
Continue reading Going (digital) Native — Four Easy Steps To Help Journalist Survive and Thrive in Web 2.0
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