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Last month I was invited to speak at the Mags University, an annual conference for Canadian Magazines, to offer a Digital Survival Guide for Editors. I blogged about it including posting my presentation slides and appropritate links back in June. After the session one of my hosts, Stan Sutter, a journalist with, among other things, a long history at Marketing Magazine, approached me and asked if I’d sit (stand, actually) for a video interview for his own blog.
He used a simple Cannon (I think) point and shoot, urged me to be brief and to-the-point, asked me couple
Continue reading My four step plan on becoming a digital journalist – boiled down to a 90 sec video
Sam Zell, the real estate billionaire who snatched up the Tribune newspaper chain, took it private in an $8.3 billion buyout, shocked tender journalists with his forthright manner, promised to build newspapers, not slash them, was hailed (nervously) by some as a saviour, cut staffing levels across the chain, shrank newsholes, started burning the furniture to heat his house, mused about (horrors!) counting bylines and setting copy quotas for reporters, ain’t backing down none. In a joint conference call with his chief operating officer Randy Michaels, and staff at the Hartford Courrant newspaper, Zell and Michaels defended their decisions
Continue reading Tribune chain boss endorses the river of news as online model
Canadian advertisers are moving more and more money onto the web, with spending continuing to grow by double digits, although the rate of growth is expected to slow this year. Alas, newspapers, while seeing healhy growth in their online revenue, are lagging behind.
From a press release earlier this week from the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada (IAB):
2007 Canadian Online Advertising Revenues climbed to just over $1.2 billion for the year — a 38% increase over 2006 actuals. Publisher revenue from Online advertising in Canada has more than quadrupled over the past five years — building from $237
Continue reading 2007 Canadian online ad revenue jumped by 38 per cent, but newspapers lagged behind
One of the big things that most newspapers (i.e. all of them) don’t get about the web is that it’s not all about creating (and owning) content. Pointing to good content is just as important.Data from the Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s latest State of the News Media report shows that all of the top ten online news sites use newspaper content (from wire services or via the web) – but only three of them are newspaper (or newspaper chain) sites. Yahoo, MSNBC, AOL, Google etc. all produce no or very little original content, and use and rely on
Continue reading The biggest mistake online news sites make: creating their own content
The US newspaper industry shed 10,000 jobs in 2007 and not surprisingly that’s engendered a lot of fear, folly and false prophets. As my own publisher Dana Robbins keeps pointing out, the Canadian Newspaper industry is in much better shape (2007 industry-wide total revenue in Canada dropped just .08% versus 9.4% in the US).
But there’s no denying nor ignoring the pain south of the border. That’s why it’s kind of refreshing to see the birth of a company aimed at helping journalists and the industry "cross the chasm" from print focused to content focused: TreeHouse Media. Founded by
Continue reading Capturing the print diaspora – disruption as a training opportunity
Staff cuts (50) and a newsroom re-organization at The Tampa Tribune made a big splash in the online journalism and blog worlds last week, but not because of the blood-letting — that’s far too common in US newsroom these days to excite much interest. No, the buzz was mostly because of a blog post written by reporting intern Jessica DaSilva, a post which (perhaps injudiciously) cheered the money-losing paper’s efforts to reinvent itself. DaSilva’s post, written with the certitude (and copy bloopers) only the very young can manage, brought forth a predictable fusilade of vituperative comments and counter comments;
Continue reading Blow up the beats: Tampa paper copes with deep cuts
During these summer months WebU is offering a series of "grad" courses – shorter, sharper sessions aimed at specific constituencies: photographers, ad sales reps, editorial writers etc. One of these sessions is for the Metroland web "masters", the folks responsible for the editorial content of our web sites. For that session It thought it would be fun to try out the Coveritlive live blogging tool, which was created by a team in Toronto, just down the highway. Here it is:
Last November, Steve Buttry, from the American Press Institute put out a call to his colleagues for advice on, as he put it, how to help an old stegasaurus upgrade his online skills. Steve, I hasten to add, wasn’t the old dinosaur in question, rather the request had arisen from one of his students. I reread what I had provided Steve and I think it’s some pretty fair advice for any journalist who’s looking to upgrade their skills, so I’m reprinting them here. But I urge you to visit Steve’s original post and take in
Continue reading Digital Survival Guide – Part 2
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