America's
Oldest Journal Covering the Newspaper Industry
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Scott Stantis Goes from 'Prickly City' to Windy City "So far, it's going pretty well," Stantis says of his new gig at the Chicago Tribune, where he recently joined as the paper's first full-time editorial cartoonist in nine years. "You want to do great work out of the box, and I keep forgetting this is a marathon, not a sprint."- October 15, 2009
Are Industry 'Rules of Thumb' Still Applicable? With so much talk these days of the newspaper business model being broken and that "everything has changed" for the industry, a curious find emerges: Even in the current crisis, newspapers are often in line with longtime traditional wisdom.- October 14, 2009
Proposed: Digital JOAs! The next media operating efficiency--one JOA for ALL major local media in a market combined. One site, one IT team, one Web server. And why "local vertical integration" trumps "corporate vertical integration" on the Web. - September 03, 2009
A New Twist on Old Question: Who Can Be a Journalist? A recent high court ruling in Brazil overturned the longtime law mandating that reporters needed a journalism degree to practice in that country. Will this lower standards--and pay? Brazilian journalists have swarmed the streets of Rio de Janeiro and other cities throughout the country to protest the court¿s decision.- September 02, 2009
Meeting a Buddy from My First Embed -- As More Return from an 'Unhealthy' War In the next week or two, the Palmdale unit of the National Guard is returning from a year in the Iraqi desert. They have made it, about 125 of them, without any killed in action, and that is a quiet blessing. But the hazards do not end with the deployment. By two-time Iraq embed and editor Dennis Anderson.- August 04, 2009
One Obit that Won't Be Published The news media, including newspapers, are really very good at shaping the public image of an institution. And the image that has been shaped for us recently is that we are a dying business. Oddly, newspaper executives have assisted in the shaping of this image by being loathe to talk openly about their own business. I'm going to break that mold.- May 29, 2009
Genesis: The Ombudsman From the Book of Kane: "And He smote the newspapers, forcing many of them into Chapter 11 and winnowing the staffs of others down to a pitiful few. And -- just for good measure -- He created the blog, thereby confounding those who had thought that it was Satan who was responsible for the Internet. Almighty indeed was the wrath provoked by the dissing of the ombudsman."- May 28, 2009
J-Schools Must Change, Add 'Specialization' and Second Major The author, a longtime top reporter with the Atlanta Journal Constitution, now teaching, argues: "In the four years since the current crop of journalism graduates began their degree pursuit, the business has changed so radically as to be almost unrecognizable." Here's what needs to change. - May 15, 2009
High Time We Set the Record Straight on Newspaper 'Myths' The crisis facing newspapers is not an audience problem. It is a revenue problem. Confronting this, and dispelling popular myths about why the industry is in trouble, is the first step we need to take.- April 22, 2009
Minority Journos: Lack of Diversity a Cause of Newspaper Industry's Crisis Minority journalists warned for years that diversifying newsrooms was critical to newspapers' survival. The industry's failure to make more than the barest progress towards diversity partly explains its current crisis, the president of the umbrella group for journalists of color said Tuesday. - April 21, 2009
Journos Are Alienating Readers With 'Retro' References Journalists who lace their copy with creaky old terms or names risk alienating those who are too young to get the allusions. Even common catch phrases that hearken back to earlier times may be puzzling to younger readers: stuck in a groove, 98-pound weakling, drop a dime, bigger than a breadbox ...- April 15, 2009
Are J-Schools Today Taking the Wrong Approach? Many journalism schools seem to be missing the point of the digital revolution and, as a result, are short-changing their students. For one thing: They seem to be under the impression that Web savviness is synonymous with a technical mastery. And what about basic skills and classes in social media?- April 03, 2009
College J-Student Wants to Work In....Print Many of us rookie reporters are having trouble adjusting to the Internet and online journalism, having only recently fallen in love - deeply, in love - with traditional print journalism. - April 01, 2009
It's Hard to Be Objective When Newspapers Die As journalists, we're supposed to detach ourselves from that which we cover -- to serve as objective chroniclers of truth. But watching the slow demise of newspapers, best exemplified lately by the Rocky Mountain News, it's hard not to take this all just a bit personally.- March 24, 2009
Questioning the Motives and Bias of Prominent Newspaper Critics Randy Siegel, president of Parade Publications, writes: "As many newspaper companies try to turn themselves around in a brutal economy, under huge debt loads and against a backdrop of increasingly funereal media coverage, it's worth looking at the behavior and motives of some of the industry's harshest critics."- March 20, 2009
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