Features
Dan Piraro, the artist behind the wickedly skewed comic panel Bizarro, won this year?s Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year, the highest honor a cartoonist can receive. Piraro talks about drawing, syndication and following in the footsteps of The Far Side legend Gary Larson.
Haiti by all accounts is only slowly rebuilding from January?s devastating earthquake, the dilatory progress a legacy of the island?s deep poverty and congenitally dysfunctional government. As Damien Cave reported in The New York Times lat month, Port-au-Prince residents still forced to live in tents and under tarpaulins are piling rubble in intersections, hoping to force city authorities to clear it.
Gannett Co. Inc. (NYSE: GCI)
Carll Tucker used to publish community newspapers. He owned and ran the Trader Publications newspapers in New York?s Hudson Valley from 1981 until selling to Gannett in 1992. Now he?s back in the community news business, with a plan that envisions launching as many as 3,000 community news sites ? and he?s guessing not one of his local partners will be a newspaper.
When Publish2 announced in late May its goal to help newspapers save money by using its content-sharing platform instead of paying for Associated Press content, a spate of dramatic, David-and-Goliath headlines followed. But as Publish2 CEO Scott Karp explains, his company?s goal is not ? as some have boldly suggested ? to kill the AP.
In late April, when the group led by former Philadelphia Newspapers CEO Brian Tierney lost in a bankruptcy auction to the senior creditors of The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, the new owners called on Greg Osberg to run the operation. Osberg spoke with E&P Managing Editor Shawn Moynihan about his plans for the two newspapers, including the digital opportunities that lay within.
?My job as a journalist is to take people places they can?t go, and I take that seriously,? says Associated Press video journalist Rich Matthews. ?This was the opportunity to do that.?
It?s always been a bit of a mystery why the Federal Trade Commission, busy enough with its main tasks of stopping price-fixing and deceptive advertising, felt it had to concern itself with the future of journalism. And now that we?ve had a look at their draft working paper that will be at the center of further discussions ? and perhaps legislation or federal fiat ? it?s our turn for concern.
At the halfway point of this term in office, President Obama has not been the game-changer many journalists expected. Perhaps surprisingly, the newspaper industry?s business agenda in D.C. is less about the White House than the Democrats in Congress.
Hearst Corp. launched FirstPaper with what seemed general and broad objectives: build a platform to serve newspapers and their readers, and build an e-reader tailored for news apps. The initiative is now in a little clearer focus under what has become its Skiff subsidiary with its platform about to launch and a device hitting the market.
Here?s the question I?ve been hearing more and more frequently from newspaper publishers and editors in the weeks since the launch of Apple?s iPad: We want to develop a tablet edition ? but how do you start?
The formats are all modern, but for newspapers looking to present content on a variety of tablets and e-readers, the process may seem like using several old typesetter languages for output. Must the same copy really be separately prepared for each device?
Devising a model for income is at least as tricky as figuring how to invest in product development. As device choices grow and prices shrink, bundling hardware at a discount with subscriptions may be less costly but also a lesser incentive.
Newsosaur: How Publishers Can Win at Mobile Commerce