I've written an essay for our chain of newspapers and sites on the transformation into Web-first newsrooms.
The information is rather basic to those who are familiar with the themes of newsroom change. It's written for a general audience. But I've tried to make some points about how there are many successes for local newspapers as they gain experience on the Web and with social media.
The early conventional wisdom was that the irregular newspaper reader was all too pleased to get the content free online and readily left the paper behind. It's a twist on the which-newspaper-will-die game: Predicting which Web site will survive. Kevin Anderson of The Guardian cites four principles of digital news development in his Corante blog post. Speculation continues about Google's next big move, and it was interesting to read the reporting of Sharon Waxman at her blog, The Wrap, about Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Guest contributors Edward Wasserman writes in The Miami Herald about the challenges of financing journalism and the realization that journalism may no longer be the preserve of those paid to do it. The Audit Bureau of Circulation released data today portraying two very different pictures of newspaper distribution in the U.S. and Canada. The New York Times' Virginia Heffernan has taken a dim view of the phenomenon of reader comments attached to online posts. They disappoint, they fail to persuade, they rant and rave, they do everything but what they should set out to do, she asserts. Social media-savvy Umair Haque suggests in a Harvard Business post that The New York Times ought to buy Twitter. Normally this would go unnoticed, except that Haque has been connected to some of the most interesting advice in media in recent years. In his Reflections of a Newsosaur blog, Alan Mutter chides the newspaper and publishing industries for devising plans to crack down on those unfairly/illegally using copyrighted material. |