Posts from ‘December, 2006’

Carl Bialik at the Wall Street Journal, aka, The Numbers Guy, torpedos the nutty claims about a video that a marketing firm estimated had been viewed 900 million times: But the Viral Factory’s rankings, commissioned to publicize the launch of a U.K. television show composed of popular online clips, were little better than a guess […]

You can hear the ice breaking up from here. Global warming, or just relations between blogs and newspapers warming up? First, McClatchy has bought Fresno Famous, the community site founded and operated with great flair by Jarah Euston. And GateHouse, whose October IPO made it the most valuable newspaper company in the nation, has rolled […]

Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters, gave a speech called “Trust in the Age of Citizen Journalism” — much to ponder here. Some of it is indisputable; some is definitely not so, such as his claim that “There is no local” in the Internet age. Some of the most interesting discussion is about how to verify […]

The Philadelphia Daily News’ Will Bunch loosely compares Craig Newmark to Lee Harvey Oswald in one of the more bizarre anti-craigslist rants to date from a newspaper guy who understands that advertising revenue is being separated from journalism in the Digital Era. Quote: If you won’t charge customers for ads, and apparently you won’t, then […]

(This is a column I wrote for the current issue of PR Week.) As I write this, scores of employees at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper, are sitting by their phones at home. They’re waiting to learn, as pre-announced layoffs loom, whether they still have jobs. I’m offended by this procedure, […]

Peter Kann, chairman of Dow Jones, says The Media Is in Need of Some Mending. Quote: At its best news informs and enlightens the citizens of a free society and thereby safeguards and strengthens our democracy. At its worst — dishonest, unfair, irresponsible — the media has potential to erode the public trust on which […]

An interesting crowd will be gathering next month in Memphis, Tennessee, for the National Conference for Media Reform. I’ll be speaking about citizen media. Hope to see some of you there.

A student wrote to ask “whether blogs are a valid form of journalism.” I replied: An equivalent question would be: Is publishing on paper a valid form of journalism? Blogging is simply a publishing method — a website. Some blogs are clearly journalism. Most are not. The bloggers who are doing journalism are for the […]

NY Times: No Stock-Class Shift, Times Co. Chief Says. Janet L. Robinson, the chief executive of The New York Times Company, sought to put to rest yesterday any notion that the company might change its dual-class stock structure, a move that could make the company vulnerable to a takeover. “The Ochs-Sulzberger family, which owns approximately […]

Pegasus News — long awaited in the citizen media community — has launched its news site. I’ll be watching with interest.