Recovering Journalist: NewspapeRx, Revisited
This list from Mark Potts (of "Recovering Journalist) is just the thing I needed in order to motivate me to ask my students to think of the online version of the paper as the primary product, and the print version a useful offshoot. (At present, the reverse is true.)
What would you do if you ran a newspaper?
Somebody asked me that question recently, and it made me pull together some of the thoughts I've had recently about the problems that newspapers are having and what they might do to pull out of their current spiral. This is hardly a complete list, but here's a 10-point prescription for ailing newspapers:
1. Make the Web the primary product
Stop pasting the newspaper onto a screen. Reorganize the newsroom so that its work appears online as quickly as possible. Breaking news, enterprise and feature stories should be put on the Web as soon as they're ready. Period. The printed paper should be a snapshot of what's online at 11 pm, and that's about it. Publishing on the Web should drive priorities, not publishing in print. And embrace the technology: news Web sites should be full of Web 2.0 goodness like interactive maps, social networking tools, RSS feeds, distribution to mobile devices, etc. Use the medium to its fullest.
(Full story)
Recent Related Entries
The New Journalism: Goosing the Gray LadyThis past year has been catastrophic for the New York Times. Advertising dropped off a cliff. The stock sank by 60 percent, and by fall, the paper had been rated a junk investment, announced plans to mortgage its new building,...
New Media Venture Turns Bloggers Into Print Journalists
As old media races to catch up with the Web and figure out how to successfully monetize print content online, one publication is taking a drastically different approach: web to print.The Printed Blog, a startup founded and funded by former...
End Times
Not if, but when.The collapse of daily print journalism will mean many things. For those of us old enough to still care about going out on a Sunday morning for our doorstop edition of The Times, it will mean the...
Global Warming: A Tale of Two Writers
While the Church gets a lot of guff for its skeptical responses to Galileo's astronomical findings, some Jesuit astronomers not only listened to his ideas but repeated his observations, and some university faculty members flatly refused to look through a...
Digg This, Huffington Post: What's $200 Million Now Worth?
Now maybe the Huffington Post could be worth more if it further cut its burn rate. For instance, rather than not pay its bloggers, it could charge them -- for the privilege of getting to help maintain the jetsetting lifestyle...
Leave a comment