Archive for the 'Industry' Category

How much do readers really understand?

Monday, April 16th, 2007

The answer: it varies. The problem is it varies a lot.
I was in the middle of writing a guide on writing a guide for online news content (how meta) when this came across the radar:
The editor of the Greensboro N.C. paper spent time interviewing loyal, 7-day subscribers to the paper last week. More than […]

“From little things, big things grow”

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

Saw this quote on the web last week. It’s the tagline from Microformatique, a blog / book about microformats. It makes sense for microformats, and it has use in the newspaper world as well.
In the face of all the challenges newspapers have, “silver bullet thinking” is attractive, and is responsible for a lot of […]

Bleeding Information

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

Last month I was talking with a co-worker, talking about what was going on with newspaper-dot-coms these days. This phrase slipped out, and I think it makes sense. Newspapers, magazines, local television and radio news operations are bleeding information. Every stroke of the shovel they make from legacy distribution methods to the web bleeds more […]

9 things I hope newspapers figure out about the internet in 2007

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

This list is aimed at online newspapers and the newsrooms that love them.

“Local” means it matters. Take advantage of it.
Newspapers harness and print tons of information. Do more with it.
There’s an amazing amount of information available in the community. It’s time to harness it, and then reward the community for participating.
If you’re not interacting with […]

Prediction 2007: Newspapers will have to open up

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007

Number 5 on a list of predictions from a iA, a multinational information architecture firm (and makers of this interesting 2007 interweb map): Newspapers will have to open up.
This is what they write:
What we experienced in 2006 was just a first round in wild independent journalism. The newspaper will learn to integrate their readers and […]

Grading Newspapers’ Website Progress: D

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

We’re talking about progress on the internet? The product newspapers offer up online these days could barely be described as marginally better than the product three years ago. Steve Outing gives newspapers a B-, which is generous enough to keep newspaper-dot-coms thinking maybe if they do blogs better and new video each day then they’ll […]

Letting local news media’s institutional knowledge slide down the drain

Tuesday, November 21st, 2006

Last night I was talking with my disillusioned journalist friend Aidan about the staff cuts that just hit a couple of newspapers, and how many older reporters left, and how much more than just bodies the newspapers lost. With all these newspaper buy-outs, lay-offs and walk-outs goes massive amounts of institutional knowledge.
It doesn’t have to […]

Copyright 2006-2008 Joe Murphy