Robert Niles: How newspapers can avoid problems

03/17/2010

 
The Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles recently delivered a speech in Singapore on the modern newsroom's challenges.

He advocates using technological understanding to build a social network to drive audience and revenue --- a basic view of almost every news manager these days --- but provides a good guide on how to get there.

Some of his ideas:

1. Get to know major bloggers in the community.
2. Get to know those blogging on your major beats.
3. Keep a list of Twitter users with more than 1,000 followers.
4. Use mathematicians to understand who in your community is most influential.

On those four points, our newsroom scores four for four. We have connections with the bloggers, the specialists, the big Tweeters and with NowPublic.com to create an annual influencers list.
 

OJR's Robert Niles: News managers need to lead in technology

03/10/2010

 
The Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles has an exhaustive list of advice for today's newsroom managers. It largely amounts to: Get with the program.

Niles continues to see a lag between the technology and the media leader. He believes it's only a matter of time before newspapers outside the U.S. suffer what they have inside the country, so he has delivered a speech in Singapore and delivered notes from it online.

Among his prescriptions:

1. Management should consume technology.
2. Require everyone to blog and have social media accounts.
3. Managers should Skype and chat instead of sending memos or talking on the phone.
4. Managers should build their communities by blogging.

Niles concludes: "Ultimately, however, the larger goal here is to get managers comfortable with, and conversant in, online communications technology.

"This comfort can't be outsourced or delegated. As news communication businesses shift from print to online, their managers must become as comfortable and conversant in online communication as they were with the printed word. Otherwise, their leaders are reduced to followers, and their businesses run adrift."
 

Robert Niles: No new journalism revenue model will emerge

01/13/2010

 
In his latest post on Online Journalism Review, Robert Niles argues that journalists and executives shouldn't continue to fritter away their time looking for a new revenue model for their business.

It isn't happening. Neither subscriptions nor advertising nor donations will be enough to sustain the existing production model of journalism.

Instead, he suggests focusing on that production model and revising it to stay within the new boundary created by unlimited competition and minuscule barriers of entry of the Internet.

He suggests the industry stop looking to conventional media for the answers and focus on the nascent efforts online beginning to bear fruit as the inspiration.
 

Online media need dual, not duelling business models: OJR

03/16/2009

 

Dave Chase contributes advice at Online Journalism Review to those looking at furthering their adventures in the digital media business: Find two businesses inside yours, rather like display advertising and classified advertising have been for the newspaper.

Chase is particularly tough on sales forces. He thinks they ought to be taken out to the woodshed somehow. But he relents and provides some compassion in suggesting that there be a new team of  "hunters" to find business and an incumbent team of "farmers" to harvest the remainder of the old business.

"The sooner local media businesses recognize it's critical to have dual business models rather than dueling business models, the sooner we'll see hiring rather than firing being the storyline of local media."

 

OJR comes back from the dead

09/17/2008

 

Online Journalism Review is back. The new head of the Annenberg School of Journalism at USC, Geneva Overholser, is resuscitating the venerable online publication, with founding editor Robert Niles reentering the picture as its first contributor Friday.
OJR will be focusing on four points: The new reporting, investigative journalism, entrepreneurial journalism, and guerilla marketing news.
For the media industry, its revival is a positive sign.

 
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