Features
As I learned in my decades of running and financing start-up businesses, it takes more than desire to successfully bring new products and services to market. Product innovation requires discipline and methods that are not common at the typical newspaper company. But these skills can be learned. Here's how.
Somewhere, Willie and Joe are smiling: Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin has received one of the nation?s highest honors by being featured on a U.S. postage stamp.
While consumers spend an ever-increasing amount of time online (more than 200 million Americans currently are on the Web about 37 hours a month), newspapers have failed ? after a decade and a half of trying ? to figure out how to follow, or lead, their readership into the digital realm.
Argentinean President Cristina Fern?ndez de Kirschner doesn?t hide her contempt for the press ? especially the nation?s biggest dailies, Clar?n and La Nacion ? and it?s pretty clear from the newspapers? commentary that the feeling is mutual.
Piet Bakker is a professor in the Department of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam whose blog, www.newspaperinnovation.com, is the most comprehensive source of information about free newspapers around the world. He spoke with E&P Editor Mark Fitzgerald.
There?s a creeping fear taking hold among traditional media types that young buck start-ups that have perfected the art of content creation on the cheap with SEO (search engine optimization) magic are moving in to displace the news and the journalists who produce it.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), best known for presenting national documentary programs like Frontline, is moving to report local news, saying cutbacks at newspapers have cut into hometown coverage. In a partnership with PBS and NPR, CPB is launching a new project that will create ?Local Journalism Centers? across the country.
Is Google News a parasite sucking the marrow out of newspapers, or a beneficial symbiotic pal, that sends lots of traffic to their sites? It depends upon whom you ask. Regardless, the company rightly or not has been accused of hurting the industry. Josh Cohen, Google?s senior business product manager who works on Google News, would like to set the record straight.
Many newspaper carriers may find their work rewarding, but not like Douglas Jordan does. Then again, most other carriers haven?t been doing it for more than 60 years.
?I didn?t have any tip-off, I was home with my wife,? says Mark Fiore, the self-syndicated editorial cartoonist who was surprised to hear he had won this year?s Pulitzer Prize in that category. The two were ?having a little business meeting ourselves, about my site, and I got the call from the online editor at McClatchy. So it was kind of a weird way to find out.?
Journalists write the stories, so it?s no surprise that cutbacks in newsrooms are usually the focus of all those hard-luck headlines about newspaper job losses in the past few years. But no matter how deeply newspapers cut, none has wiped out an entire newsroom. Yet that?s precisely what?s happening on the operations side, as plants are consolidated or mothballed and work is outsourced or simply ceases to exist.
Some say they?re leaving for greener pastures, but keeping up the fight for online may just be a losing battle. Is the newspaper industry in the throes of a serious loss of digital knowledge?
The joke goes that every Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist knows how the first sentence of his or her obituary will read. But it might be noted that in 2010 a prominent Pulitzer mention showed up, if not in the birth announcement of online-only journalism, then at least in a coming-of-age ceremony.
Newsosaur: How Publishers Can Win at Mobile Commerce