It’s painfully apparent that digital revenue cannot yet support substantive professional journalism for smaller daily newspapers. I don’t know that it ever will, either. Fortunately, it does not necessarily follow that community newspapers are doomed. If the goal is to find a near-term replacement for all the revenue necessary to support a newsroom and newspaper [...]
Thanks to Steve Yelvington for unearthing a prescient piece by Philip Meyer. In AJR, back in 1995, Meyer predicted much of the disruption now shaking the news industry. Reading it today is fascinating, both for what he hit and what he missed. First, a quibble. Meyer talks about newspapers as high-turnover operations, similar to supermarkets, [...]
The Index-Tribune’s abandonment of its paywall illustrates the challenges news organizations face as they move toward paid-content models in competitive information markets. And it suggests that many, or even most, will ultimately fail.
Looking at three keys to web-positive publishing that build reader engagement: immediacy, interactivity and interneticity.
Very few online readers demonstrate loyalty or use approaching anything like the readership of the daily print paper.
What distinguishes successful online innovators is not the brilliance of their ideas, but rather how well they muddle through partial successes and even outright failures to arrive, eventually, at something that works for their audience and their organization.
The trend toward Web 3.0-style integration is real enough, and that stands to fundamentally change the relationship our readers and viewers have with our sites.
The newspaper industry is fighting a two-front war. Some newspaper companies are fighting on three fronts. Most observers see only a single struggle for survival, and they’ve all but consigned us to the dustbin of history. That’s premature. On one hand, we’re fighting against long-term structural changes in the way people get news and advertising [...]
It’s gotten so I can sense the question coming ahead of time. Friends drop their voices into a particular register, a low, sympathetic tone, and ask, “So how are things at the paper these days, anyway?” It’s the same tone people use to ask about a relative with a terminal diagnosis. I appreciate their concern. [...]
Like so many others, we’re moving away from the practice of pumping our print content online for free. We’re now in the last stages of developing a Drupal-based CMS that (we hope) will help us to differentiate our online publishing activities from our print publications and also make it possible for us to begin charging [...]